


These Endless Numbered Days

by travellingcircus



Category: Blood and Chocolate (2007), Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Extended Universe - Fandom, Polar (2019)
Genre: Age Difference, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Barebacking, Canon-Typical Violence, Daddy Issues, Daddy Kink, Hannibal Extended Universe, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Rough Oral Sex, Set in the mid to late 2000s, non-sexual choking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:54:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 61,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28984449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/travellingcircus/pseuds/travellingcircus
Summary: In Bucharest, while working odd jobs here and there, Aiden bumps into a strange man called Duncan Vizla.
Relationships: Aiden (Blood and Chocolate)/Duncan Vizla | Black Kaiser
Comments: 15
Kudos: 41





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [A_bello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_bello/gifts).



> This was supposed to be a short fic with the premise "Aiden and Duncan keep bumping into each other while Aiden works odd jobs in Bucharest", but it morphed into its current state. Set in mid to late 2000s after the events in 'Blood and Chocolate' and before 'Polar', so there may be references to things popular at that time like flip phones and JUICY Couture lmao. I tried to warn for everything, but let me know if I forgot to cover anything!
> 
> This is my first ever fanfic for this fandom and this rare ship! My god. I've only been lurking and reading fic for a few months and checking fun head canons on twitter before this happened. Follow me @oxfordtwink if you enjoyed the fic! Or just feel like it. 
> 
> Thank you to @Bello7atwinkie's amazing twitter threads and photosets which inspired all this, really! 
> 
> Lastly, this fic is split into 4 parts. I decided to post everything in one go because I finished editing it in a week and there's nothing I love more than sinking my teeth into long fic!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing ever good comes out of investigating strange noises and that’s why Aiden stays put when he hears a creak and a groan coming from the general direction of the dumpsters.

* * *

Bucharest has not always been Aiden’s first choice of destination. 

If he wanted history and a noticeable tan, then he would have gone to Athens, but he’s always loved a good story, and it’s a story that brings him here, sitting on the crumbling steps of a church built by a monarch some three hundred or so odd years ago.

The stained glass windows that peer into the gardens glisten with last night’s rain. Inside, the ceilings are frescoed with the glorious symbols of Judeo-Christian worship: gilded cherubs grace the walls alongside somber-eyed saints and the Virgin Mary in all her splendour cradles an infant Jesus, haloed and breathtaking under the flicker of midnight candles. 

The churches of Bucharest are beautiful; Aiden has snuck into all of them. He takes something from each—a piece of broken marble come loose from the flooring, a hymnal someone left on the pews, a candle burnt down to the wick—collecting them like lucky pennies. He doesn’t believe in god and has never prayed a day in his life, but sitting on hallowed ground, alone in the dark, surrounded by the pageantry of religion and his paper and pens, is in itself a religious experience. 

Something moves through him like a fever, something unbidden and holy. And he likes the quiet; he likes the peace. He likes that the churches are so old they feel haunted; the hair on the back of his arms stand on end as strange noises call his attention in the dark.

He meets Vivian on one of these nights. 

He thinks she’s the miracle, the one to save his soul, but it’s just like what his mom used to say back when she’d still been alive: some people are in your life for the course of a season, and some are only in it for short moments. 

Vivian wasn’t the final note in the song, but she was the beginning.

They agreed to go their separate ways after certain... _extenuating_ circumstances which may have involced a pack of shape-shifting wolves chasing Aiden through the woods with the intent to kill him. 

He would have left the country to start over as usual but like every other artist living day to day, he’s broke as hell. No one wants to hire an American who barely speaks a lick of Romanian. 

And so the job hunt begins: he scours the city for help wanted signs plastered on shopfronts, pores daily over the classifieds where there’s under the table work whose sole requirement is that he shows up on time and never asks questions. 

Eventually, he lucks out: a bartending gig, near the city centre. Three months of pay would finally allow him to move out of the youth hostel where he has to sleep clutching his bag at all times or risk losing his belongings. He’d made the mistake of leaving his shoes under the bed once, and woken up to find he was also missing a pair of socks. It would be nice to have his own place after so long living with strangers and to not have to elbow someone out of the way for a hot shower.

The only requirement is that he should be _at least_ six feet tall. Aiden is just shy of the criterion by a mere four inches but he shows up at the club at six in the morning anyway because, he tells himself, what’s there to lose? He barely has any pride left; he’s wearing secondhand shoes for god’s sake and the soles are nearly worn down at the heel that they hurt his feet on every second step.

Plus, it’s bartending, how difficult can it be? No one is born a bartender, the way no one is born a surgeon or a dentist. If it’s a skill that can be taught, then it’s a skill that can be learned and what better way to build competence than through trial and experience. 

Aiden’s good at taking instruction and he would have thrived in high school if he’d just learned to apply himself, stopped doodling on all his textbooks and actually paid attention in class. Would’ve made his dad proud too, and maybe he’d have made something of himself if continued on that path and he wouldn’t be wandering the streets of Bucharest peddling his art every second Sunday of the month. But he’s made his bed and now he has to lie in it.

To regret one thing would be to regret everything. And wolves notwithstanding, life isn’t so bad. It may not be brimming with joy all the time but it’s not the stuff of soap operas either, if you don’t count the erstwhile run-ins with the wolves. 

The manager of the club—tattooed, wearing a shirt printed with Dachshunds, vaguely threatening but in a strangely attractive way— takes one good look at him before asking him a single question:

“Are you American, Mr Galvin?”

And Aiden says yes, because to lie would be pointless. He’s already rattled off his job history; there’s no hiding his accent. 

The manager hires him on the spot on the basis of his nationality, the first time that’s ever worked to Aiden’s advantage outside the States. Often people give him a funny look when they find out he’s American, but Aiden thinks those looks have more to do with his face than anything else; if he didn’t let his stubble grow then people would keep mistaking him for a teenager. He’s been carded too many times to count. 

It’s almost funny that he’ll be working at a club, the very type of establishment that would often turn him away.

It’s not easy but no job ever is at first. The music is a terrible mess of techno remixes from the Billboard Hot 100; the counters and floors are just short of being a grimy mess, and there’s people throwing up all the time—in the washroom sinks, on the dance floor, even on occasion the walls. 

Eventually though, Aiden gets the hang of it, mixing drinks and flirting with customers, calling his favourite patrons by name. He builds a rhythm; he stops overthinking. And things are fine, perfect, until one day when he’s sitting outside enjoying a turkey sandwich on his lunch break and a man crawls out of the dumpsters and starts bleeding on the ground.

That’s when things start getting pear-shaped and life as he knows it tilts on its axis. 

“Shit,” Aiden says.

* * *

Nothing ever good comes out of investigating strange noises and that’s why Aiden stays put when he hears a creak and a groan coming from the general direction of the dumpsters. He ignores it because he knows better now, after having met Vivian’s entire extended family, not to poke his nose where it doesn’t belong and turn his ear away from things that can potentially bring him misery, werewolves sometimes included. 

There’s only ten minutes of his break left, and this is some good rye bread, fresh form the oven with toasted sunflower seeds. One of the upsides to being friendly with the cook is that Aiden can steal from the kitchen larder with hardly anyone putting up a fuss. That means he’s guaranteed at least one free meal on the days he’s scheduled to bartend, which goes a long way in aiding to his long term goal of moving out of his appallingly inhumane living situation.

Aiden manages to enjoy a further five seconds of peace before the dumpster lid at the mouth of the alley gives a shuddering groan, and then slams open with a rusty screech that has him jerking in shock and losing his grip on his turkey sandwich. Behind him he can hear the faint pulse of techno music bleeding through the back doors, pounding in time to the staccato rhythm of his heart. 

A car rumbles past, headlights shining like eyes before it cuts away and plunges the street back into darkness. The club is sandwiched in between a sporting goods store and an exotic restaurant and both are closed for the evening. This means there’s no one around in the back alley except for Aiden and this stranger who’s just emerged from the bowels of the club’s dumpster like a creature from the deep.

It’s probably just a homeless man or some random drunk, Aiden tells himself with a burgeoning panic he decisively ignores, it’s nothing worthy of concern. 

But then a moment passes and then another and there’s neither movement nor noise coming from the dark blob laid flat on the sidewalk, so Aiden decides, _fuck it_ , and just walks over.

He’s no stranger to people passing out from having one too many drinks; Aiden’s seen enough of them at the club. Some of them get grabby; almost all of them have terrible aim when they throw up. He crouches next to the man from a distance that won’t seem conspicuously rude, wrinkling his nose and nearly gagging; the man smells a bit, like he’s been sitting in garbage for a while though his clothing doesn’t seem to indicate vagrancy and there’s no noticeable scent of alcohol.

“Hey,” Aiden says. “Are you all right?” 

The man doesn’t move. Aiden pokes his shoulder with a finger, and jabs harder when there’s no reply. “Hey.”

Still nothing. Aiden leans forward to check if the man is still breathing; thankfully his chest is moving, even if his breaths are a little sluggish. His skin has some warmth to it; Aiden cups one bristly cheek in a palm and attempts to pat the man awake.

He’s got one of those faces that ping something familiar in Aiden’s memory. He’s not the club’s usual demographic—late forties if he’s being generous, judging by the grey in his moustache and the fact he has one at all that’s not even remotely in fashion. 

Aiden might have seen him once or twice when the number of people at the club has dwindled, and he’s clearing glasses away at the bar or standing outside by the small awning along with the smokers, basically just being everywhere in the man’s periphery. 

The manager of the club has friends, and then he has _friends._ There’s a clear distinction between the two, and he makes it known. This man may very well be one of the latter on account of his awful fashion sense and his moustache. Nigel doesn’t dress well; neither does the company he keeps, save for his lovely wife Gabi.

“Hey,” Aiden repeats, this time with a little more volume. 

The man’s head lolls limply to the side but his eyes remain shut. Aiden scents blood on him, underneath the distinct rank of rot and garbage. The man’s shirt is dark, a little warm for the weather, but if Aiden squints hard enough he can just make out a large stain on the man’s side where blood has seeped through the fabric.

It hits him maybe five, ten seconds later.

“Oh god you’re bleeding! Shit, shit, shit. You got stabbed. _Shit_.” Aiden stumbles back on his ass before crawling on his knees and scampering to his feet. “Look, _stay here_. Don’t move. I’ll call for help. My manager deals with shit like this on the daily; he’ll know what to do.”

The man grunts in response, which has Aiden freezing and glancing furtively over his shoulder. 

There’s movement now, a series of aborted attempts to sit upright; then the man gives up altogether and just groans, clutching his side. Blood all right, and still fresh; it coats his fingers and knuckles. “I’m fine,” the man says, loud enough to carry across the length of the alley. 

“Look, you just crawled out of a fucking dumpster and now you’re bleeding on the sidewalk,” Aiden points out, but he’s kneeling next to the man, closer this time even if he has to wrinkle his nose. “ _How are you fine?_ ”

The man blinks one dark eye open. His lips are turned down, but that could just be the effect of his facial hair; it makes him look mildly dissatisfied by everything, like someone who’d just found a bug in his soup. “I can call you an ambulance. We need to get you to the hospital.”

“No hospitals.” The man is surprisingly calm considering the amount of blood he’s losing, and it lulls Aiden to a deceptive state of zen himself. Maybe it’s not so bad; it could just very well be a flesh wound. He peels the man’s shirt back to check the extent of the damage and holy fuck, _it’s gnarly_. Aiden forces himself not to gag.

“Taxi. Call me a taxi,” the man rasps, squeezing Aiden’s wrist hard enough to yank him back to the present. Aiden notices that the man is missing a glove, an innocuous detail that makes the situation all the more surreal. The fingernails of his bare hand are crusty with old blood. He’s dressed all in black and later on that will make perfect sense—black hides blood, black blends in the shadows—but not right now, not when they’ve just met. 

“Hey,” the man says. “You still with me?”

“Sorry. I was just — does it hurt?”

It’s such an inane question but Aiden is so out of his depth that his mouth just keeps moving without input from his brain. 

“Yes,” the man says. “But I’ve been hurt worse. Will you call me a taxi?” he asks. “Please,” he adds, like he’s asking for the bill at a restaurant. His voice is low, gruff, like something with edges that have been sanded down.

Right. Taxi. Aiden can do that. One thing at a time, and maybe they’d both make it out of this alive. There are still taxis cruising this part of the city even so late at night, drivers hoping to swindle drunk passengers and susceptible tourists trickling out of clubs. 

Aiden flags one down, not that hard, then hurries back to the alley to drag the man to his feet. 

“Up we go. There we are. Come on, put your arm around me.” He heaves them up with a sudden burst of strength, knees swaying and almost canting toward a lamppost. “Jesus, you’re heavy. No offence.”

“None taken.”

The cabbie gives them a once-over before turning and flicking the metre on. 

“You’re an angel,” the man sighs, to which Aiden just shrugs. He’s far from it but there’s no point trying to argue. The man, in addition to smelling like an unholy combination of things, is clearly delirious which can only be attributed to one of two reasons: either he’s lost a lot of blood or like Aiden who spends an unhealthy amount of his time in churches, is just a desperate romantic.

Aiden eases him into the backseat, moving his head out of the way so it doesn’t hit the ceiling. 

“Rough night?” the cabbie asks in English, lightly accented as Aiden has the man strapped in with a seat belt. “What’s _that smell?_ What the hell happened to him?”

“He’s hurt,” Aiden replies tightly. “Found him in a dumpster—”He ignores the skeptical eyebrow. ”I think he might’ve gotten mugged, actually. You think you can take him to the nearest hospital?”

“Depends. Can he pay?”

Aiden glances at the man whose eyes are tightly shut and whose face is an unnaturally pale shade. Something about the sight tugs at him. Sighing, he relinquishes a roll of crumpled bills—his share of tonight’s tips plus a little extra change—and forks it over with a grimace. “That enough?”

The cabbie hums noncommittally as he counts Aiden’s money and Aiden makes sure to commit his face to memory. “Eh, I guess.”

Aiden goes to shut the door but the man catches his arm in a sudden move that makes Aiden yelp. The man stares at him serenely. “No hospitals.” Aiden’s face must show his discomfort because the grip eases, before going completely lax. To the cabbie the man repeats the exact same thing in Romanian but with some choice expletives that Aiden has yet to apply to his everyday vocabulary. 

“You really need to get yourself looked at,” Aiden says. “And I mean, _really_. As in right now. Today. Do you want me to ride with you to the hospital—wherever you’re going?” The _I don’t want you to die_ is implicit. He may have just met this man, but he’d found him and therefore feels accountable for whatever outcome there’ll be. Aiden would never forgive himself if the man _just died_ because he decided to make a detour to the airport instead of driving straight to the hospital like a normal person. 

“Thank you,” the man says. “But I can take care of it. I’ll get myself checked; this is nothing. I should be fine. I _am_ fine. Don’t worry.” His manner of speaking is interesting; deliberate, building into a rhythm, like every word takes more effort than the last. 

“Right. Well, good luck,” Aiden says, actually meaning it, and hops backwards onto the sidewalk after patting the roof of the taxi. 

It whisks off into the night, taking its lone passenger with it. Aiden watches it disappear down the street corner then stares down at his hands damp with blood now. There’s some on his shirt too where their bodies had pressed. He rubs his elbows, shivering with the aftershocks of delayed adrenaline rush. Then he starts walking back to the club where he changes into a new shirt and washes his hands three times before resuming his shift at the bar.

* * *

If there’s one good thing Aiden will acknowledge about working odd jobs, it’s getting around and meeting new people. Juggling several jobs at once doesn’t allow room for much socialising, and after the whole fiery mess with Vivian, he’s started to seriously cut back on spending all his free time in churches. 

Barely having any friends outside work might make him sound like one pitiful bastard on paper, but he’s always been self-sufficient, and he’s never let superfluous things like the lack of a social network distract him from his real goal which is to get as far away from his father as humanly possible short of moving to another solar system. 

If that means running himself ragged trying to feed himself in a country where he only knows half a dozen verbs, then so be it. It’s not the end of the world. 

One Saturday morning while stationed on the fringes of Izvor Park with the buskers and other ne’er do wells preying on the kindness of tourists—vendors selling deep fried peanuts, retirees feeding pigeons—his phone rings in his pocket in the midst of negotiating portrait prices with a customer.

There are only five numbers currently stored in Aiden’s phone and two of those are publishers who’ve lost interest in his work shortly after he went missing following the great werewolf debacle. He doesn’t recognise the number but he flips his phone open and takes the call anyway, holding up a finger to excuse himself from the conversation. 

“One second,” he says in Romanian to the man wanting to haggle him down to practically nothing after Aiden had spent a full hour on his girlfriend’s drawing. 

The man huffs, tosses a one-leu banknote into his tip jar, and then starts walking away.

“Hey!” Aiden calls out to him when he’s halfway down the corner. “What the hell, man!”

“Aiden my friend! Are you busy tonight?” 

Aiden stares warily at his phone. “Who is this and how did you get my number?”

“It’s Oskar!” says a cheery voice when Aiden presses his phone back to his ear.“Your old friend!” 

Aiden is tempted to retort that he doesn’t have any friends, old or otherwise but tamps down on the urge to do so because saying it out loud would make him feel even more pathetic. He hurries back to his post before anyone moves his stuff or steals the contents of his tip jar. It’s a good spot with the most foot traffic, but business is slow this morning with people opting to spend the day by the duck pond, taking advantage of the warm weather.

“Listen, have I got the job for you,” Oskar says, tone suspiciously enthusiastic. They’d met on one of _those jobs_ back when Aiden hadn’t known any better _,_ wet around the ears and fresh off the plane from Chicago where he’d lay low for a year before getting itchy feet. 

While Aiden can only stand the man three times out of ten, Oskar knows the best clubs in Bucharest and is easy enough to charm when Aiden needs to borrow some money. He’s also the most street savvy person Aiden’s ever known with more connections than a corrupt politician. 

“The last time you got me a job I almost went to jail,” Aiden says flatly.

“That was a hairy situation wasn’t it?” Oskar laughs, a little too loudly, an obnoxious donkey’s bray. “Ha, ha. Good thing we were saved by those beautiful eyes of yours.”

“I almost offered to blow a cop!” Aiden reminds him. He cringes at the memory.

“There will be no blowing on the job this time, my friend, ” Oskar assures him. “A quick in and out. Just one night.”

“I’m not sure I want to know what a quick in and out entails.”

“Have you ever been to the _Palatul Cotroceni_?”

Aiden hasn’t. The entrance fee is exorbitant and he hates any sort of activity that has him mingling with tourists. It’s how he met Vivian: sneaking into a church in the dead of night for some peace and inspiration is his idea of a good time. People can be so unbearable in crowds.

In the end, he finds himself relenting, only because work has been scarce lately and he’s sick of eating beans from a can. 

The job seems easy enough on the onset: the cousin of a friend or something or other needs an extra pair of hands on their catering crew. There’s a gala next weekend at the _palatul_ ; it’s all hands on deck. Oskar had put in a good word for him but he’d also volunteered himself.

“They wanted good-looking people,” Oskar explains when Aiden shows up halfway into the orientation, an hour before the opening, his hair tamed down for once though an errant curl bounced free every now and again. “As you can see.” Oskar gestures to himself. 

But he isn’t lying about the qualifications. More than half the staff look fit to grace the covers of a magazine. _Unemployed actors_ , Oskar supplies helpfully when Aiden glances around the room and makes a mental tally of the crew. The kitchen is filled almost shoulder to shoulder, everyone seemingly between the ages of twenty-one and no older than thirty.

They’re provided uniforms—tie, shirt, pants and vest— as well as their own name tag made to look like real good, shiny and new. This is so everyone is accounted for; at the end of the evening they’re expected to ditch the clothes and go home in the same ones they came in, otherwise their pay gets docked.

“Be nice,” Oskar tells , pinching his cheek so hard Aiden has to bat his hand away. “And remember to smile.” 

“Fuck you,” Aiden says, but there’s no time for frivolity because the guests have just arrived outside and there are trays of champagne waiting to be served.

* * *

Aiden’s understanding of galas is mostly this: the rich rub elbows with the rich, money changes hands, and nobody says it but everyone in the room is just pretending to like one another. Someone important gives a vapid speech, and now and then if you’re lucky an oil baroness loses their jewelry and it’s yours to keep. 

Inside the lobby, gilded and glistening with mirrored surfaces, Aiden has to fight the temptation to nick ornaments from the shelf if only to piss some rich person off. Waltzing through the room serving drinks isn’t too terrible of a task only because he can eavesdrop on snatches of conversation. It’s a completely different world from the one he’s living in, Aiden realises, not for the first time, with everybody dressed in silk, gold, and diamonds and planning their summer holidays in Venice. 

Aiden has to be careful not to bump into anyone—the golden rule in these types of events because the downstairs servants must always make themselves unnoticeable— but he’s never been light on his feet, and before the night is over he ends up careening into someone exiting a door to his left.

He almost drops his tray of dainty pastries if not for the hand that steadies him and by extension the tray in his hands. 

Aiden’s ready to babble out a slew of apologies—he’s new here, he doesn’t speak fluent Romanian, _scuze_ _scuze_ — when he peeks over his shoulder and spies a familiar face. He has a hard time believing it but he recognises that moustache instantly, and the face attached to it, handsome now under the warm glow of the chandeliers with more history than Aiden can ever comprehend.

Aiden has terrific memory, that’s why he always has trouble sleeping, and he’s certain that it’s the same man from that night outside the club.

“It’s you,” Aiden says eloquently, blinking once, then again. The man rights him back up and raises an eyebrow, his hand lingering on Aiden’s shoulder before falling away. He looks good, sleek and streamlined in a three-piece suit that must have cost four years’ worth of a university education if Aiden had ever gone. He doesn’t smell like garbage which is an improvement, and his hair is parted to the side, neat and not covered in detritus. He looks _whole_ and _fine._ Very fine. 

“I know it’s you,” Aiden says, because he remembers faces, and it’s only been two weeks. Bucharest may offer a bevy of interesting characters, some of them of the lupine persuasion, but he’ll never forget anyone who calls him an angel while they’re on their death throes. 

“Is it you?” Aiden finds himself faltering from the lack of response. _“_ Oh shit, maybe not—shit, I’m sorry. _Scuze._ ”

“ _Aiden_ ,” the man says, with just the slightest inflection, his gaze resting on Aiden’s name tag before flicking back up, alight with recognition. 

Aiden’s cheeks warm like hot soup. He feels like he’s being appraised. He feels both overdressed and underdressed and wants to step out of his clothes. 

“You look nice,” he babbles, letting shamelessness get the best of him as he gives the man a once over. Nice is an understatement. Nice is for temperate weather, for the bland biscuits your aunt offers you when you come around for a visit. Nice is for people who lack imagination. Nice doesn’t even begin to cover how the man looks. 

“Where’d you get the suit?” Aiden asks.

The man strokes his palms down his lapels. Every action is flawless and calculated but Aiden can tell he’s not used to getting so dolled up. “Do you like it?” the man asks. “Covers the beer belly.” He pats his abdomen. “I borrowed it from a friend.”

“Never pegged you for a rich person,” Aiden says, admiring the way the suit envelops the man’s broad frame, a vessel to contain sinew and strength. “Not that you can blame me; I met you crawling out of a dumpster.”

“Not one of my finest moments,” the man agrees with a pained sigh. “But I’m not here to mingle. This isn’t my usual crowd; I’m just here to collect a debt.”

“Yeah?” Aiden probes.

“Yes,” the man says. 

Aiden lingers in the hallway, scuffing the point of his shoe against the plush carpeting, leaving a streak. The man is staring at him, openly, without looking away, but the moment is short-lived because then he excuses himself briskly to go about his business—debt collecting, Aiden would assume. He snatches a fruit tart from the tray Aiden is holding aloft and nods once.

“Wait!”

Down the hall, the man does a half-turn. He glances sideways, over his shoulder, waiting. 

“You should probably stay away from the main course,” Aiden tells him. “The sous chef recently had a bout of diarrhea but you didn’t hear that from me, all right?” 

“Does it have shellfish?” the man asks.

Aiden shrugs. He doesn’t know.

“I’m allergic to shellfish,” the man volunteers. 

“Don’t I at least get a name?” Aiden asks, because he’d done it before with Vivian and it worked after a time, like prodding a painful tooth or prying a window open with a crowbar. Aiden tells himself he’s only asking because he needs all the friends he can get. Bucharest is a big city; it gets lonely when you don’t speak the language. And maybe the man can hook him up with a job, or he’d bump into Aiden on the street one day and they’d have coffee afterward, and then, and then— 

Aiden is interrupted from this bout of theatrical fantasy when the man lifts his fruit tart in a wry salute. 

“It’s Duncan.” 

“Duncan,” Aiden repeats, parts pleased and disappointed. It sounds…almost pedestrian. At least he’s not named Bob. Aiden would not have forgiven him if his name was Bob.

“I’ll see you around, Aiden. It was a pleasure running into you again,” Duncan says and before Aiden can wave goodbye, he’s disappeared around a corner, out of sight.

* * *

The _Palatul Cotroceni_ is a big tourist draw because in addition to being the presidential residence, it also houses the National Cotroceni Museum. This means security is tight enough on a regular day without the added bonus of a gala event. No one without proper identification goes in or out. Everyone is frisked at the door, including the staff.

A live orchestra is playing a familiar symphony from the balcony of the palace. Even through the door of an emergency exit, where he’s perched on the second floor landing before a flight of stairs, Aiden can hear the music swelling and swelling. He’s in the museum wing of the palace, which boasts more modernised improvements in the architecture with the addition of better venting and an actual fire escape but the soundproofing is still bad, built in the sixties and never updated, which means Aiden can also make out bits of conversation outside.

Unlike Oskar who thrives in this kind of frenetic environment, Aiden’s opted to spend his fifteen minute break in seclusion as per his ritual. The kitchen is rife with activity still and he’s seen the smoking area, a ritzy corner of the garden reserved mostly for the guests and sectioned off by a velvet rope. There aren’t many broom closets but he’s not that desperate yet.

A rapid pound of footsteps from up above sends Aiden’s tupperware flying from his lap. In the same moment he’s scampering to his feet to gather the remains of his salad, Duncan comes skidding to a halt on the second floor landing. Their gazes lock for as long as it takes for Aiden to just let his tupperware go. Bits of arugula and lettuce cover his brand new shoes but that seems negligible when faced with Duncan once more. 

A piece of hair has come loose from its expert coif. Duncan’s suit is also covered in blood, in enough amounts for it to be alarming. He didn’t just accidentally land in a vat of cherry pie filling; Aiden knows the smell of blood because his father made sure of that. 

“What the fuck happened to you?” Aiden asks, ignoring Duncan’s slow blink at his use of language. He reaches forward to check him for any injuries but Duncan moves smoothly out of the way and raises both hands in a placating gesture. Aiden is suddenly hit with an eerie sense of déjà vu, remembering their first meeting. Blood, it’s always blood with this man. 

“Are you all right? Fuck! Are you hurt? Oh my god, you just keep getting into trouble, Jesus fucking Christ—”

“This isn’t my blood,” Duncan replies with a hint of concern for how hysterical Aiden is being. “I’m not hurt, Aiden. I’m not hurt.”

Aiden lets the weight of those words sink in. Upon closer inspection, that seems to be true: Duncan doesn’t look like he could be hurt. He could have very well just had a leisurely bath for how relaxed he looks, despite the thin red streak slashed across one cheek. 

“Do you want me to call an ambulance? Security?” He points to Duncan’s cheek. “You’ve got red on you,” he says faintly.

“No ambulance,” Duncan says, rubbing at the spot with the heel of his hand, smearing blood across a sharp cheekbone in the process. It doesn’t seem like it’s his blood either; Aiden’s night just keeps getting better and better. 

“No police,” Duncan adds, like he can see the gears of Aiden’s mind turning.

“Of course not,” Aiden says. So much for being a debt collector. 

Duncan steps forward and Aiden leaps and takes a step back in turn, his back hitting the wall, his breathing turning hard and frantic. He doesn’t take his eyes off Duncan but neither does Duncan take his eyes off him. Now would be the time to run, do something, yell for help, but all Aiden does is stand there shivering like a pinned butterfly, staring at Duncan’s moustache because he can’t bring himself to meet his eyes.

And then Duncan leaves him be, easy as that, with a barely perceptive nod of farewell. He has long strides and keeps a straight back even as he takes the stairs two at a time. His tie flaps over his shoulder.

“Duncan!” Aiden yells, and this time Duncan looks up and their gazes lock. He doesn’t smile or respond-- he doesn’t do anything, in fact, except wait for whatever it is Aiden has to say. 

“Be careful!” The words are out before Aiden has time to process them, and even as he says them he’s thinking, _what the fuck, why the fuck_. 

“I will,” Duncan promises, and his voice echoes up the landing, rich like something from deep underground, a sound that makes the skin of Aiden’s neck prickle and his palms sweat. “Always am.”

Somehow, given the circumstances of their first meeting, Aiden doubts that. 

When he runs into Oskar by the ice sculpture long after his break is over, Oskar gives him a dismayed look before asking him where the hell he’s been. Aiden doesn’t bother explaining himself, just picks up a tray that’s handed to him and does what he’s being paid to do.

The night proceeds without further fanfare. 

Aiden hands in his uniform at two AM after helping with clean up but not before signing some paperwork so that he can collect his cheque by the end of the week. It’s not until he’s back in his apartment, eating instant noodles straight from the pot and watching his neighbours bickering on the sidewalk at five in the morning, that he gets wind of the news. 

Crackles of static interrupt the radio broadcast. Despite Aiden’s knowledge of the Romanian language being poorer than a toddler’s he knows the words _moarte_ and _crimă_ and wishes he were more surprised that they’re being used in relation to discussions about last night’s gala _._

In the morning, he scans the headlines when he passes by a newspaper stand. Sure enough, there it is in bold letters above a picture of the palace front: a dead body had been found in the men’s washroom of the _Palatul Cotroceni;_ witnesses being asked to come forward. 

* * *

Business is winding down for the night and the sign at the cafe window has just been flipped from OPEN to CLOSED. 

After drawing the short straw, Aiden is left with the arduous task of closing up shop, which is his least favourite chore on account of the number of different padlocks he has to check and double check before going home. Of all his side hustles, this isn’t even the worst one though because it’s customer service it still makes him want to drink a lot. He makes his money in tips because the pay —he’s on a tourist VISA and therefore not officially on the payroll—is practically peanuts, but his boss likes him enough because his smile rakes in all the sales and has zero compunctions about standing on the sidewalk dressed like a coffee bean while handing out fliers. He’s done everything from take orders to buy everyone lunches, though his boss mostly keeps him front of the house to lure unsuspecting tourists. 

Aiden wipes up the counters and then puts the last of the chairs up on the tables.

After a requisite inspection of the ice machine, he flicks the lights off one by one before stepping outside to test the give of the entrance doors. Then he starts his long walk down the Calea Victoriei, passing shuttered storefronts and twenty-four-hour groceries with brightly lit neon signs advertising lottery tickets, restaurants turning away last-minute customers. Across the street drunk American tourists search vainly for bars still open at this hour, laughing and shouting as they try to walk a straight line. 

Aiden shoves his hands inside his pockets and hunches his shoulders, the universal sign of a man wanting simply to be left alone. He’s exhausted, can barely feel his own hands from how chapped they are from a day spent submerged in sudsy water. All he wants is a nice hot shower, the kind that thaws his bones down to the marrow. Then he wants to sleep for three straight days. He’s about to cross the street, waiting for the light to change, when he makes the mistake of glancing briefly over his shoulder. 

The door to a pawnshop swings open, releasing a stream of conversation that makes Aiden’s body tense. There’s a man standing against the wall of the building adjacent, and it dawns on Aiden that he recognises the man, solely because it’s the same man from six weeks ago when he was still working that waitering gig, the same one from a week before that who’d crawled out of a dumpster.

A single lamp is attached to the exterior of the building, way up near the roof overhang, and it throws out a weak yellow circle onto the sidewalk.

Aiden squints, and then Duncan starts, pushing away from the wall and tossing his cigarette.

At first Aiden thinks Duncan is ambling towards him—Aiden lifts his hand tentatively in a wave—but then he makes a sharp left turn and then barrels straight into the pawnshop with the brazen strength of a military tank. A series of gunshots go off and someone inside the shop starts yelling in Romanian. A second later, there’s the sound of glass shattering, and it makes Aiden flinch because it’s a sound he knows intimately well from childhood, like the creak of footsteps outside his bedroom door or the clink of beer bottles. Then a body hurtles through the storefront window, landing with a dull thud on the sidewalk and staining the uneven cobblestones with blood dark as an inkblot.

Aiden doesn’t breathe. He’s never seen a dead body before. The night he and his father got into fisticuffs, the night he fled, he stood over his old man’s unconscious body and wondered what it would be like if he never woke up again. In the end, he dialled 911 before taking the remaining cash from his dad’s wallet and hightailing it out of there.

Calmly, like he’s taking a stroll down the Champs-Élysées, Duncan walks down the length of the street with a cigarette bobbing from his lips. 

Headed, Aiden realises, in his direction. 

Their eyes meet in the split-second a passing car flashes its headlights, and then they’re plunged back into the murky blue-blackness of late evening.

“Aiden,” Duncan says, but Aiden panics and starts to run. Duncan blinks after him for a couple of seconds before kicking into motion himself. 

Aiden has never been good at all out, running-for-his-life type situations, but he can do distance, and he can definitely evade, if fleeing from Vivian’s werewolf pack is any indication of his survival instincts. He cuts through side streets, dodging wayward pedestrians walking their dogs and ducking under swaying washing lines.

Eventually his body betrays him by refusing to go any further. He falls to his knees on the sidewalk, chest twinging from the franticness of his breaths. His body is thrumming with adrenaline, and he can feel sweat beading along his hairline, dripping down the sides of his face. 

“Fuck it,” Aiden says out loud. He barely has any time to react before a hand shoots out from the darkness and slams him face-first against a wall down a long dark alley that’s deserted and hidden from view because that is just how Aiden’s life is. 

If it’s not his father’s wrath he’s trying to escape then it’s a pack of rabid werewolves with a personal vendetta; violence just follows him wherever he goes, like he’s been marked since birth. His father said it was his fault his mom died. She was never supposed to have him; the doctors had warned her about the complications.

Aiden does what most people would do in his situation which is to flail his limbs like an unhinged windmill in hopes to land a solid punch. But the grip on his neck is firm and unyielding, same as the body pinning him unforgivingly to the brick wall: hot like a fever running under the skin, sturdy like the hull of a ship. _Good luck trying to escape that,_ Aiden thinks to himself in a fit of hysteria _._ He whimpers and decides, fuck his pride, fuck all of it, he’s too young and pretty to die, he hasn’t even published his first graphic novel yet; he’s only twenty-six. He’s never even been in love before.

“Please,” he whines, and if it comes out as pathetic even to his own ears then at least there’s no one around to hear it. If a tree falls in a forest…And anyway, this is not a hill he wants to die on. He doesn’t want to die, period, not without anything to show for it, in a foreign country where he can barely speak the language and keep the food down.

“Hey,” says the man accosting him. Aiden realises he’s hyperventilating like crazy because he’s suddenly dizzy and shaking like he’s having a seizure, and he can’t help it; he keeps flashing back to his dad: his dad hauling him out of bed and shaking him awake. His dad, his dad.

“Hey, kid.”

His vision is starting to blur at the edges but Aiden has enough sense to be able to make out what’s being said to him. “Kid,” Duncan repeats into his ear. Yes, it’s him: Duncan of the mysterious smiles and the purported shellfish allergy. Duncan who’d just walked out of a building after having killed a man in cold blood.

“‘M not a kid,” Aiden mumbles, with a sudden and vehement flash of annoyance at Duncan not remembering his name even after they’ve met _twice_ already. If this is what old age does to people, then maybe Aiden wants no part in it. He has trouble enough trying to remember his Romanian verbs.

“My name’s Aiden,” he says more loudly. “I’m not a kid. ”

“ _Right_ ,” Duncan says somewhat stiffly. “Of course you’re not. Aiden, you need to listen to me. Take deep breaths for me, all right? Can you do that? Nice and slow.”

Aiden stiffens; his shoulders feel tight like a pole has been lodged between them, the only thing keeping his body from falling apart. He doesn’t even notice that his knees are trembling until he does what Duncan instructed and steadies his breathing. He slumps against the wall, winded. There’s a hand on the small of his back. The one curled around his neck hasn’t left at all; he feels a thumb sweeping tentatively over the thrum of his pulse.

After a beat or two, Duncan finally eases his grip on him though he doesn’t step away. “All right, there’s a good boy. Nice and slow.”

Aiden whimpers again, an involuntary reaction he can’t make sense of, but then again _strange times_. He clenches his eyes shut, mortified. He’s not a fucking dog, and he wants to say just as much until he remembers Duncan probably has a gun on him and who knows what else. The man outweighs him by a good thirty pounds. Most of it is solid muscle.

“Did you just kill that guy from earlier?” Aiden asks, apropos of nothing because apparently in addition to being in possession of a masochistic streak, he also has no filter. 

If Duncan seems startled by his question, his face doesn’t show it. Aiden twists around and tries to study his expression in the dark. 

“It’s just a job,” Duncan says. “No hard feelings. Do you know what I mean?”

Aiden does. He nods, fighting the urge to swallow, and Duncan grins down at him with the streetlights glinting off his teeth, which are stained with a transparent sheen of red and look just the little bit menacing. This should not look as devastatingly charming as it does but Aiden has always been a poor judge of character. He dated Vivian and she had ended up belonging to an entirely different species altogether—that of the lupine persuasion; clearly, there can be no accounting for taste.

“Promise me something Aiden. Can you do that?” 

Aiden nods again without really thinking when Duncan cups and pats his face to draw his attention back to the present. The texture of his glove is cool against his already sweat-clammy skin, making him shiver. 

“Good,” Duncan says, nodding along too.“You saw nothing tonight, all right? If the _politie_ ever knocks on your door and asks you for a description of a man you might have seen leaving a building, you’ll tell them you can’t remember anything.”

Duncan doesn’t blink; neither does Aiden for a time. Aiden pushes his tongue against the back of his teeth, thinking, then not thinking; then he remembers to breathe. “I can’t remember anything,” he echoes, slow and deliberate.

Duncan looks infinitely pleased and it occurs to Aiden later on that he might have been worried about needing to kill Aiden if he hadn’t been so amenable. “ _Good_. I’m glad we’re on the same page. Aren’t you?”

Aiden doesn’t run, or make any attempts to flee even after Duncan finally releases him and puts some measurable distance between them, respectable yet still keeping him within stabbing range. Aiden notices for the first time that he’s wearing leather gloves despite it being about ninety degrees out, which vacillates between off the charts obnoxious and making complete sense. He’s also wearing a black turtleneck in July but seems completely unperturbed by it, though maybe it takes more than off-season clothing to ruffle him.

Then Aiden notices Duncan’s face which hadn’t looked this beaten up when they had bumped into each other earlier in the evening. Nasty doesn’t even describe the bruises on his jaw. 

“Did you get into a fight?”

Aiden hears it as if on cue: the wail of police sirens cutting through the night, the leitmotif of every bad dream he’s ever had since leaving home.

Duncan flicks a glance out on the street, sharp, calculating. Then he turns his gaze back to Aiden, his face completely blank expect for the smirk tucked right underneath his bushy moustache, god that fucking moustache. “I had an eventful night.” he says, shrugging without any discernible changes in his tone or expression. “Took a few detours before I came to find you.”

Aiden chooses to ignore the alarming implications of this statement because some things are just too much to ask of a man who’s just been roughhoused and realised that he’d enjoyed a part of it. Instead he rubs a hand over the back of his neck where he can still feel the phantom weight of Duncan’s leather-clad grip. He squeezes the muscle twice, sighing before biting the inside of his cheek. 

“I live just a block from here,” Aiden offers, voice a breathy reedy thing, either from lack of oxygen or just utter shamelessness. But he refuses not to meet Duncan’s eyes, because call him what you want, but he did outrun a pack of werewolves and came out on top better for it, all his limbs intact and with just a few more additions to his usual zoetrope of nightmares. 

“You can hide in my apartment,” Aiden continues when no response seems to be forthcoming. “Or whatever,” he adds into the awkward silence, conceding defeat. “I don’t know,” he rambles. “I have whiskey. It’s the good kind?”

“Do you now,” Duncan replies without missing a beat, and his voice is deep and darkly amused, before he starts walking down the length of the alley, waiting for Aiden to follow.

* * *

Aiden’s apartment is a dump. There’s no denying it. But it’s a vast improvement from the cramped youth hostels marking his early days in Bucharest where mold just about grew everywhere and nothing felt safe to touch. His apartment, shit hole that it is, is a point of pride, a place of freewheeling selfhood. He has a bed, a desk, a tiny kitchenette, a window big enough to perch on with a view of the street below where washing lines crisscrossed in a haphazard pattern.

There are pots and pans spread across the floor to collect dripping water. Duncan almost knocks his foot into one of them before stepping back and throwing Aiden a look that is a complicated mix between bafflement and apology.

“It’s an old building,” Aiden explains, scooping up a bunch of papers from his desk and cramming them inside his sock drawer. “There’s leaks everywhere. Um. Sorry about the mess.” He dips his head in embarrassment. The last person he had invited up here had been Vivian and she had said nothing about the smell because they had both been too preoccupied running for their lives. 

Aiden makes a mental note to stop collecting and inevitably losing strays. All they do is sneak out the window after they’ve been bathed and fed, which is something that could also be said for anyone Aiden has ever let get close enough to hurt him. Huh.

It’s warm in the apartment most days, and it’s humid now that it’s almost summer. Music, something Aiden recognises but too soft to name, is bleeding through his neighbour’s wall. Aiden lays his palm flat against it, feeling the rough scrape of the peeling wallpaper against his palm, the soft reverberations of muffled sound.

“How’s your—you know…” Aiden gestures awkwardly at Duncan’s torso before dropping his arm back to his side. It’s been more than a month since their first meeting and Aiden still remembers the sharp tang of Duncan’s blood in his hands. He’d never seen a wound that grisly before; Duncan looked like he’d been purposely cut open, the intent to kill. 

Duncan continues to just look at him mildly. He doesn’t answer, which is to be expected but there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth—strange almost how that makes Aiden feel—but he doesn’t say anything and he keeps himself still, studying the pitiful makings of Aiden’s apartment. Like a lion from one of those nature documentaries that Aiden used to love so much as a kid, crouched low in the swaying grass and waiting to strike. Duncan wields his stillness like a sharp knife, but no that’s not an accurate description at all, because Duncan is more like snow in a desert tundra the way he holds himself silent. There’s a stark dangerousness to him that only becomes readily apparent when the wind stirs him into action, a moment of inertia before he becomes an unstoppable force. 

“You draw?” Duncan asks, finally moving and looking around. The bed is covered in sketches: women, animals, strange horrible-looking things that have featured quite prominently in Aiden’s dreams in the last few years. 

Embarrassingly, Duncan picks up a sketch of a werewolf. “These are good,” he says, not taking his eyes off the paper.

“Yeah, um. Thanks,” Aiden says, coughing. 

Duncan lifts up more of the drawings. Underneath are larger pieces, some done in colors, some in pencil and charcoal. There’s a short series of sketches from Aiden’s first few weeks in Bucharest, aborted attempts at light study, and then another one of Duncan drawn solely from memory the night Aiden had bumped into him wearing a three-piece suit like the pornographic embodiment of shaken not stirred. Thankfully, the sketch isn’t as incriminating the way some of Aiden’s dreams have lately been, but Aiden still feels a pinprick of sheepishness when Duncan flicks his gaze up in question. 

“Where did you learn how to do all this? School?”

Aiden shakes his head. “I wish. Left home when I was about seventeen. I’m mostly self-taught.” He lets out a laugh, hoarse and self-deprecating. “Dad didn’t have the money to send me to any classes. Not that he cared anyway. He wanted me to join the army, like him.”

Aiden sighs, scratching at the faint whiskery beginnings of a beard on his jaw. “I’m not really doing much with it, so. I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it _is_ a waste of time.”

It’s not often that he feels sorry for himself but it’s the first time in a long time that he’s let anyone seen his sketches. There’s stuff he sells just to make a quick buck. Then there’s the other stuff he keeps for himself in his desk drawer, personal and secret. Like that sketch of Duncan that took him half the night to finish. Getting his moustache right gave him a cramp in his wrist.

“These are really good,” Duncan says, in the same even, unreadable tone, before handing him back his drawing. Briefly, their fingers brush, and Aiden surprises himself by not acting like a complete idiot and writhing in fits of newly discovered lust. 

“Your dad doesn’t know shit,” Duncan says.

Aiden grins ruefully. “People tell you something about yourself enough times you just start to believe it, you know?”

Duncan grunts in response before seating himself gingerly on the windowsill, hunched forward with his elbows braced on his knees. Aiden’s apartment is tiny, almost the size of a closet, but the fact has never really bothered him until this precise moment. Anywhere he goes Duncan will be able to follow him with his eyes. Aiden will always be within reach; there’ll be nowhere for him to hide. Even from across the room which in reality is just five paces away, Aiden can hear Duncan’s breathing, pained and stilted. 

Light from the street outside strays through the window. It highlights the flecks of silver in Duncan’s hair and casts half of his face in shadow but it does little to hide the bruises that bloom fresh and vivid on his jaw. Just above his brow is a nasty looking scar. Aiden sees a patch of motor oil on the stretch of Duncan’s pant leg. Or at least he hopes that’s motor oil. He jerks his eyes up when Duncan grunts again.

“I can take care of that for you,” Aiden says with the air of someone offering a complete stranger a back alley blowjob, low and sultry and just the little bit suggestive. Judging by Duncan’s raised eyebrow, he’s not exactly sure what’s on offer, and it takes Aiden maybe a full five seconds to realize that words, with the right tone and inflection, can mean entirely different things depending on the context.

“I meant your face! _Shit_ —I wasn’t—”

Duncan doesn’t even blink. Maybe he’s evolved to never feel the need to; maybe he’s not even real, a figment of Aiden’s overactive imagination, conjured by his loneliness and wishful thinking. Real or not, Aiden will have to give credit where credit is due: Duncan may look like someone’s disgruntled uncle who just found out he got shortchanged at the store but he cleans up remarkably well and his face is, well, Aiden can’t stop staring at his face, never mind the bruises.

“I just meant your _face_ ,” Aiden repeats, voice rising an embarrassingly high octave because he has no pride left at all; whatever little he had of it has been demolished now because he keeps putting his foot in his mouth. “It looks… _bad_. And I don’t mean generally. You’re a very attractive man, I’m sure you get that all the time, I mean, come on, just look at you, but you look like, well, you look like you ran into someone’s fist. Repeatedly.”

“Who says I hadn’t?” Duncan says. 

“What?” 

“Who says I hadn’t?” Duncan repeats, a note of clear challenge in his tone, like he wants Aiden to start asking questions he’s not sure he’s ready to hear the answers to. 

Then Duncan makes a noncommittal sound, a sort of low grunt that has Aiden biting his lip and reining in a bodily shiver. Aiden takes this as his cue to start rifling through the medicine cabinet for the first-aid kit out for a lack of a better thing to do. 

It takes him longer than necessary, between staring at his own flushed reflection in the bathroom mirror and pressing a palm over his thumping heart. If Duncan had been some girl Aiden had brought home for sex, they’d be in bed already and stripped to the skin, giddy with arousal, but Duncan isn’t some girl he just met at a bar; he’s a strange man with an enormously magnificent moustache and he knows seven different ways to kill a man. And Aiden had just invited him into his apartment so he could hide from the authorities. Like a complete lunatic.

Aiden tells himself to just be a fucking adult for once and drags a stool from his drawing desk to plant himself in front of Duncan. 

Duncan looks at him with skeptical eyes but otherwise stays silent. He doesn’t flinch when Aiden presses a cotton ball soaked in antiseptic to the cut on his lip and he doesn’t blink when Aiden presses harder, because maybe, maybe he’s used to taking pain. Aiden cleans the blood off to the best of his ability but Duncan is apparently the type to poke at his scabs before they’re ready to come off because he keeps worrying at the gash on his cheek with the tip of a finger. 

“You shouldn’t do that. That’s going to scar.”

Duncan gives him another one of those emphatic looks. A moment later he drops his hand on knee before flexing it into a tight fist.

After a few seconds, Aiden shifts his focus and concentrates on slowly applying the butterfly tape over Duncan’s left eyebrow. Duncan’s gaze is unreadable, steady as his breath which is warm and smells like menthol cigarettes. Aiden is careful not to take big gulpfuls of it; the back of his neck is already prickling with a strange kind of warmth from sitting so close to him. 

It’s strange, this whole thing; this could be a scene from a movie, where the silence is long and expressive and everything has a meaning.

“I was a boy scout when I was a kid,” Aiden says when he finishes with the worst of Duncan’s cuts. 

“They teach you first aid in boy scouts?” Duncan asks. 

“You’d be surprised by half the stuff they teach us,” Aiden grins. “I didn’t mean that to sound like… Never mind.”

“You get all the merit badges then?” 

“No, but this kid Lyle Lyman did.” Aiden remembers that smarmy grin and those horn-rimmed glasses, not with a shred of fondness. “All one-hundred-and-thirty-nine of them.” 

“That’s a real person’s name? Lyle Lyman?”

“Yeah. The name of my childhood nemesis.”

Duncan lets out a wheeze. 

Aiden blinks up at him in surprise. Duncan’s eyes are crinkled in the corners, his mouth tilted in the shadow of a smile. 

“What?” Aiden says, getting the distinct feeling that there’s something Duncan isn’t telling him. It makes his throat itch. In fact, if he’s being entirely honest, it makes the rest of his body itch and he is barely able to curb the sudden desire to take all his clothes off and throw himself out the window.

Then Duncan’s expression turns somber—which means even his moustache becomes involved. “You want me to take care of him for you?” He ducks his head in a conspiratorial whisper, his voice rough with a smoker’s rasp. 

Aiden makes a face at him. “Don’t be ridiculous I don’t want you to— _oh_. _Oh_ , so now you decide to make jokes? Very funny. Ha, ha.”

Duncan smiles, with just a hint of teeth. It softens the sharp angles of his face into something a little more tender but Aiden isn’t quite ready to delve into that just yet so he gets up and fetches them two mismatched mugs from the shelf and his half-empty bottle of Jameson whiskey pilfered from his short stint as a bartender.

He pours them about a finger each because they’re not exactly friends yet, more like estranged acquaintances, and alcohol is expensive in this part of Europe and he’s not sure he’s ready to deal with a tipsy hitman in his apartment. 

After a beat, because Aiden can’t stand the silence, he says, “So you really kill people for a living huh?” like a complete idiot with no social graces.

The only answer is a rustle of leather as Duncan bites at the fingertip of his glove and pulls it off with his teeth. 

Aiden doesn’t even bother to pretend he isn’t staring. It’s his apartment after all; he can do whatever he wants. So he takes one more long look at Duncan’s hands—big, capable, just like the man himself— before tipping the rest of his drink back in one swallow. It doesn’t help but it burns going down so at least that’s something. 

“You know that most people who ask me that question end up dead?” 

Duncan lifts his chipped mug in salute before downing it in a smooth pull, lips twisting momentarily. 

“I’m not afraid of you, you know,” Aiden says, because this feels true, at least in this moment. If he were in any real danger, he’d be dead by now, not mooning over a man with a moustache, wearing a black turtleneck. 

Duncan gives him a look that says, in no uncertain terms, _maybe you should be afraid,_ but Aiden just shrugs and pours them both another shot of whiskey. Next door, his neighbour has stopped playing music so the only sound in the room is the occasional clink of their mugs and Aiden’s intermittent sighing, the breeze whistling through the eaves outside his window.

When Aiden looks at the clock, its digits swim in his vision. He gets up, wobbling a bit from the abrupt change in altitude, before tossing away all the garbage, the bloody remnants of his attempts at playing Florence Nightingale. He heads to the kitchen, a mere two and a half strides away. “Here,” he calls, opening the freezer and tossing Duncan a frozen bag of peas, which he’d been saving to make mint pesto.

Duncan mutters his thanks before pressing the bag against his cheek where the swelling is the worst. It makes him look like he was chased and stung by bees. 

“You look a bit like you were chased and stung by bees,” Aiden laughs, because this is funnier said out loud than in his head.

Duncan opens his mouth but before he can give Aiden a proper response, his phone starts going off in his pocket. He takes it out with a grimace. There’s a call coming in but he doesn’t flip his phone open until the last minute and then his accent smooths out to perfect Russian syllables like a lifelong polyglot. Aiden decides to leave him to it, leaning against the fridge and pressing a cool glass of water against his cheek. He thinks he might actually be a little tipsy. 

“Can I keep this?” Duncan asks.

Aiden opens his eyes. When he turns, he sees Duncan with a piece of paper in one hand and the bag of peas in the other, already thawing and making a small puddle on the floor. He hasn’t put his gloves back on. Which is… Both interesting and disappointing in turns.

Aiden’s cheek stings from where he’d set the ice-cold glass against it for five whole minutes. “You want the peas?”

“No, I want the drawing,” Duncan says, narrowing his eyes in faint amusement. Of course. The drawing Aiden had done of him. Usually Aiden is loathe to part with his sketches but this time he’s willing to make an exception if only for an excuse to draw Duncan again. 

“Sure,” Aiden tells him magnanimously. “You can have both.”

“Thank you,” Duncan says. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with the bag of peas but he does nod rather primly, before tucking the drawing into his jacket pocket, folded in two, and then glancing up at Aiden.

“I have to go,” he says, cradling the bag of peas like an infant.

“Got another job waiting?”

“Yeah,” Duncan says. He doesn’t look too happy about it, but who can blame him. If Aiden’s job consisted of constantly murdering and/or threatening people then he’d be a depressed alcoholic. He could also have been already dead. 

“You’ll be all right, won’t you?” Duncan asks, raising his eyebrows.

“Of course I will be,” Aiden huffs, slightly offended by the question. “What does that even mean.”

“Good,” Duncan says. The answer seems to please him. He nods again, like he thinks he’s some sort of knight taking his leave, and then he slips out the door without another word.

* * *

Aiden is no stranger to working the odd job here and there. It comes with the lifestyle. Art doesn’t pay the bills—at least not yet—though it gives him the excuse to sit in churches for longer than is strictly fashionable to work on his graphic novel.

Between his job at the cafe and moonlighting as a waiter on and off, he’s sometimes able to make rent on time. Five days out of seven though, he’s still pretty broke. The pre-school where he teaches a finger-painting class only schedules him when they need a substitute. 

It’s honest, easy work most of the time but there can be nothing more terrifying than a roomful of five year old kids high on sugar and adrenaline.

Briefly he wonders, as he’s wont to do these days, what the hell he’s doing with his life. The thought stays with him on the walk to the hardware store where he fills his shopping basket with paintbrushes he’ll be invoicing the school. He’s decided that the class has graduated from finger-painting and need to move onto more ambitious pursuits so today they’ll be painting bare wall of the school playground. 

“Aiden?”

Aiden pivots a little and sees Duncan standing behind him at the counter.

He blinks, and it takes a moment before his brain stutters back online.

“Duncan,” he states, because seeing him so unexpectedly like this—in broad daylight, looking deceptively normal and wearing _glasses_ — catches him completely off guard. 

There are many images of Duncan in his mental bank, that much is a given, but now they’re all incongruous with this latest picture. _Duncan in reading glasses._ He looks like he could be someone’s dad, the kind that drinks malt beer on the weekends with his buddies from out of town and is two years shy of retiring from his job as an administrative clerk at a government office. 

Aiden knows himself well enough to think that maybe that’s why he’s so fascinated by it. The image just doesn’t fit at all with his notions of what a hitman should look like, but it makes Duncan seem all the more real to him. Ridiculous, because who in their right mind wears turtlenecks in the summer, but he’s real; a person with hobbies and other things going for them, outside the context of his… _profession_. 

“We just keep running into each other don’t we,” Aiden says, once his mouth has actually decided to work again. 

“Small city,” Duncan informs him, raising his eyebrows.

“Of what, two million?” 

Aiden pays for his stuff but doesn’t leave—not yet; he waits in the wings, rocking back on his heels. “Your face has healed,” he observes with a hum.

It’s been a month, give or take. Of course it’s healed, Aiden thinks, not without a rush of annoyance at himself. _When did he stop being so smooth?_ He used to be a pro at making casual smalltalk that didn’t involve annoying the other person but maybe that particular skillset only works when he’s charming American girls with the whole soulful artist schtick. Maybe it’s different out here in Europe where the people are more expressive and the bread is always fresh and the weather shifts moods faster than a temperamental lover. He can’t even discern what accent that’s from, if Duncan is Danish, Polish, or just well-traveled. 

At the very least Aiden is relieved to see that Duncan’s bruises have healed nicely, that there’d been no scarring save for the pale sliver trickling up his eyebrow, faint and only visible from up close.

Aiden smiles lightly when he catches Duncan sliding his gaze down to his shopping bag. “I’m teaching art to a class of first graders,” he says, expression morphing into a full blown grin. “Hence the paintbrushes. I don’t need so many. I get my own from Amazon.”

He glances at the counter when the cashier rings Duncan’s purchases.

Pliers, a power tool, and a hefty-looking handsaw. Plus a multi-pack of garbage bags —10 in one.

Aiden swallows. “DIY project?” 

Duncan hums. “Something like that.”

Aiden doesn’t bother asking him to elaborate. 

Outside, they fall into step together, easy as anything, side by side amid the early morning throng of pedestrians rushing in opposing directions. On a street corner, a busker has set up shop and started strumming a guitar. There’s a bus stop just down the street that goes all the way downtown and through every tourist spot in the city. In his periphery, Aiden can see a cluster of people getting off the bus and then on. 

“Are you doing anything?” Aiden asks, before he can really think about what he’s saying. “Like in the next couple of hours?”

Aiden decides to steamroll him before Duncan can find the opportunity to turn him down. “So I’m teaching this class, right? And the kids—they scare the shit out of me. Have you ever had a dozen five year old kids stare at you for ninety minutes straight?” It’s not a fate Aiden wishes on his own worst enemy, not even Lyle Lyman who had called him a bad word in Boy Scouts. Well, just maybe Lyle Lyman. “Not all of the kids speak English and my Romanian is a little rusty—you do speak Romanian right?”

Duncan says something briskly in a language that even Aiden can recognise is Romanian because he’s lived for a long enough time in Bucharest to pick up bits and pieces here and there and glean their meaning. Coming from Duncan’s mouth however, the words sound positively filthy, rough with suggestion, but in reality he’s only saying, if somewhat disbelievingly, _Of course I speak Romanian. My mother was born in Rasnov. But my father was German._

“So what do you think,” Aiden says, widening his eyes innocently, affecting an overly plaintive tone. It’s worked on train station attendants before, on his boss when Aiden refuses to be stuffed into an ill-fitting costume in the shape of a coffee bean that smelled like the body odours of employees past, on fucking _Rafe_ Vivian’s now-deceased cousin who wore shirts with too many buttons missing; he’s sure it’ll work on Duncan. 

At least, he hopes it does. It’s been foolproof, until now. 

Duncan presses his mouth into an unhappy line. He shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “I don’t know how to talk to kids.”

“You don’t have to talk to them, you can just glare at them and they’d behave themselves.”

Another look, before their shoulders bump together deliberately or by accident. “You think that’s funny?”

“A little.”

Duncan sighs. “Kids are unpredictable.”

“Would you do it?” Aiden asks anyway. “Come on.”

Duncan doesn’t answer, not for a long time.

“Please?”

Aiden has never heard him sigh so many times within the span of a conversation, but he’s nothing if not persistent. He’s also annoying, Vivian had said once when he was still trying to get her to tell him her name. _You’ll wear anyone down if nothing else._ He doesn’t see it as a bad thing, at least some of the time when it works to his advantage. 

There’s a pause as Duncan scans the receipt in his hand before stuffing it into the breast pocket of his coat. “All right,” he concedes. “But only for ninety-minutes.”

* * *

It turns out that Duncan is a hit. 

He answers questions matter-of-factly, fielding them like he’s in a diplomatic summit where the goal is to be as vague but civil as possible while using only euphemisms and platitudes.

The kids don’t love him per se but they do eye him with less hostility than they normally do Aiden on a given day so he counts it as a success.

Aiden wonders if this has anything to do with Duncan’s bulk; Duncan is a big man and he has the ability to intimidate people. 

It’s more to do with his looks than his general demeanour. Aiden’s seen him charm half the waitstaff at that charity gala they were both in but he’s also seen him crawl out of a dumpster covered in fruit peels, so it has to be something Duncan can turn on and off at will. He wouldn’t be a hitman otherwise if he can’t blend into a crowd like the world’s best con artist.

Today must be another exercise for him: the part of a normal person. He’s slouched on a lumpy bean bag in a corner of the classroom and paging through a dog-eared copy of _The Very Hungry Caterpillar,_ forehead scrunched as if it makes for immersive reading. 

Duncan has his chin tilted down, and the way he’s sitting gives him a hint of double-chin from a certain angle. He flicks his gaze up to meet Aiden’s when he approaches, righting himself quickly and smoothing a hand down his shirt. His eyes crinkle a bit in the corners. Behind his reading glasses, the skin around them is rubbed a tired pink. 

“Duncan?”

They both turn at the sound of Sofia’s voice, tiny timid little girl with big brown eyes and dark hair in twin ponytails. She’s the illegitimate daughter of a diplomat. They get all sorts of kids down here, mostly the offspring of ex-pats. 

“Yes,” says Duncan without inflection, snapping the book shut to smile tightly at her.

“Are you Aiden’s dad?” Sofia asks, and what follows is the most horribly awkward silence in Aiden’s life.

Duncan turns to Aiden with a gleam in his eye that makes Aiden flush for the second time that day and he hates this, he really does, what has become of his life. He blames Vivian, because it started with her, this crazy business of finding himself trapped in the strangest of situations, in a classroom full of first graders in the middle of an art class, accompanied by a hitman with a confounding moustache.

“Am I?” Duncan asks with the barest tilt of his head in Aiden’s direction. _Am I your dad?_ What kind of question is that? Only a maniac would ask these things.

Aiden makes unintelligible noises with his mouth and ushers Sofia back to her easel so she can work on her Dalían depiction of her dog. For the rest of Quiet Art Time, Aiden makes it a point to keep to his side of the room, telling himself it’s so he can oversee their progress and not because he’s avoiding Duncan.

“Sorry about that,” Aiden says later in the playground where they’ve migrated so that the class can wreak havoc on the bare, pristine wall by the jungle gym as promised. They’ve started to mill about tentatively, blinking like little ducks in the sun, dabbing their little paint brushes against the pale brick, elbowing each other for canvas space.

Duncan hunkers down a swing, the seat creaking under his weight. “It was funny,” Duncan replies with a straight face.

“ _Oh, god_ ,” Aiden says. 

Duncan throws him a sideways look. “I thought you said the kids were terrifying.”

“Of course they’re not.” Aiden rolls his eyes, gesturing at them now flicking paint at each other. You take your eye off them for one second… “Not with you around. You probably terrify them more. I mean, you’ve got this air about you—”

“Like I would hurt them?”

Aiden blinks, dips his head. “What? Sorry—I didn’t mean. Sorry.”

“I’m off the clock.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?” Aiden asks. Then understanding dawns and his neck is suddenly warm. “Right. You’re off the clock.”

Duncan makes a contemplative noise. His gaze is faraway, stretching beyond the here and now. When he snaps out of it, he taps the empty swing next to him, a silent command Aiden feels oddly compelled to follow. 

“I was going to build a birdhouse today,” Duncan says without prompting, riffling through his pockets for his cigarettes, grunting when he pulls out a misshapen pack, flat in places where he’s sat on it. “When I ran into you at the hardware store.”

“Called it. DIY Project.” Nothing nefarious, thank god, because Aiden doesn’t think he can deal with that side of Duncan’s life yet. It’s one thing to know somebody kills people for a living, it’s another to talk about it like commenting on the weather. 

Aiden sits next to him, digging his heels in the soft dirt and letting gravity sway him forward. A cool breeze sifts through the leaves above them, their only shade from the noonday sun.

Duncan starts smoking quietly. 

“Are you bored?” Aiden asks, the metallic screech of the swing chains a rhythmic accompaniment to the happy shrieks of children in the background. “You shouldn’t be smoking around kids, you know. It sets a bad example.”

Duncan sighs before extending his cigarette toward him. 

“I don’t smoke,” Aiden tells him. “Not anymore,” he adds after a significant pause. It’s an expensive habit, one he can’t afford, living day to day in a foreign country. Also his father had been a chainsmoker. As Aiden got older he tried harder and harder not to end up like him. He grew his hair long because his dad hated it, said it made him look like a girl, and devoted himself ruthlessly to his art knowing it would piss his dad off if he found out. Moving to Europe had been his first big step, a way to distance himself both socially and physically, but there are some things that you just can’t outrun, like death and taxes or a middling aunt. Wherever you go you take a piece of home with you, which means Aiden will carry his scars everywhere with him, especially the ones that are skin-deep. 

“It’s bad for you, anyway,” Duncan agrees. “Bad for kids.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Could have fooled me,” Duncan says, and he’s joking, he must be, because there’s that twitch again of the upper lip expertly hidden by that damn moustache. How does he drink coffee with that thing? How does he do anything? Aiden feels himself flushing hotly, furious for no reason other than the fact he finds Duncan’s moustache obnoxiously offensive. He’s been thinking about it ever since that night in his apartment, when Duncan had drunk Aiden’s shit whiskey and took his drawing as a souvenir. Wondering what it would feel like pressing against his skin, and incongruously, whether or not he ever trimmed it to keep it looking so well-groomed. But Aiden’s been thinking about Duncan a lot lately, both in passing and at length: what it was like for a man to have to kill people for a living and if it was ever worth the money for the kind of nightmares he must take to bed with him. 

Aiden tilts sideways, from gravity if nothing else. His heart is pounding; he can hear it like the roar of the ocean in his ears. With a flick of a wrist, he knocks the cigarette from Duncan’s grip and it ricochets across the playground to land still smouldering in the dirt. Duncan looks at him like he’s just lost his mind and maybe Aiden has—it wouldn’t be the first time, he remembers the look on Rafe’s face before he’d tossed them both over the balustrade— but then Aiden kisses him, sudden and impulsive and with the clink of teeth, with a steadiness that surprises them both.

Aiden registers the taste of menthol and coffee, the quiet tickle of Duncan’s moustache making his own nose twitch on the first inhale. But Duncan isn’t moving, he doesn’t seem to even be breathing and Aiden tells himself the diminishing joy in his stomach is only because he hasn’t eaten since breakfast. The kiss lasts only for a few seconds and then Duncan is looking at him curiously from a few inches away.

“Mr Galvin, why are you kissing your dad?”

“Shit!”

Aiden launches himself some ten feet back, stumbling over to where Sofia is watching them bug-eyed with curiosity and paint splattered overalls.

He herds her along with the rest of the class back inside without a backwards glance at Duncan who makes no move to ever follow them. Then it’s time for recess and Aiden takes a moment for himself to assess the current situation. The facts are: he’d vastly overestimated his sex appeal and the palpable frisson between himself and Duncan. Now he’d ruined whatever was left of their…friendship? Acquaintanceship? Maybe it’s for the better that it never went anywhere. Duncan said it himself: Aiden’s just a kid. He’s probably been propositioned all over, no doubt by people far more interesting than some sham of an artist trying to make ends meet. 

He’s chewing on his thumbnail, worrying his teeth down to the nail bed, when Sofia shyly steps up to him and tugs at his sleeve, offering him a piece of chocolate. 

“You look sad,” she says.

“Thank you,” he tells her, patting her on the head. “I’m not sad. Just thinking.”

“Where’s Duncan?”

Aiden bites down on a bitter smile. “He went home. He got tired, Sofia. You know how old people are.”

“You don’t look like him,” Sofia points out, face crumpling as if it’s a thought that’s been bothering her all day.

“That’s because we’re not related,” Aiden tells her. “He’s not my dad.”

“That’s what Stefan says about Papa. He says we got different dads because mama was a dancer and had a lot of friends.”

Aiden sighs. He doesn’t know what to say to that—substitutes don’t exactly qualify for a proper teacher’s seminar— so he just thanks her again before sending her on her way.

Half an hour later and the kids have all departed in a whirlwind, leaving him with disheveled hair, several paint streaks running down his shirt, and a classroom that looks like it’s been ravaged by a tornado. Half a pot of coffee has only served to make him jittery. He’s been shelving and re-shelving books for the last ten minutes, staring at nothing and frowning at a lapful of glossy picture books in Romanian.

Behind him, the door squeaks open, the bell above it tinkling in greeting. Probably one of the kids. Aiden pulls himself off his knees, rubbing his hands down the front of his jeans and plastering his best bland smile, the same one he uses when he’s working customer service. “Hey, did you forget anything—”

_It’s Duncan._

“I thought you went home,” Aiden says, unable to keep the irritation from his voice. He turns to shuffle some papers at his desk, making more noise than is probably necessary when he staples them together and then staples them again for good measure. 

It occurs to him belatedly that he probably shouldn’t turn his back on a dangerous man like Duncan, but what even is the point when he’s long past caring. If he were truly worried about Duncan he wouldn’t have tried to kiss him. Oh, god, he tried to kiss him. Of all the stupid shit he’s done in his short life, that probably ranks as the worst—even worse than when he thought it was a good idea to date a werewolf.

“Aiden,” Duncan says, and then repeats his name a little more firmly when Aiden doesn’t respond. “Aiden. Look at me.”

“What?” Aiden says, whirling around to glare at him. “ _What,_ ” he hisses. 

“You’re upset,” Duncan states.

Aiden doesn’t want to look at him because his face is doing this complicated thing, like it hasn’t made up its mind yet whether to laugh or cry out of sheer frustration.

“I’m not upset. It’s not that,” he says, but he doesn’t know what it is so he just stops. “Sorry I made you come here. It was a bad idea. You had better stuff to do.” Like maiming people and toppling third world governments. He tries to imagine Duncan building that birdhouse, and his thoughts segue into wondering what else Duncan did when he was off the clock.

“Don’t apologise. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be.”

Aiden barely resists the urge to roll his eyes. “You should go.”

“You want me to go.” Even though it’s a question, Duncan doesn’t make it sound like one.

Aiden nods, just the once. “Yes,” he says, and places the stack of papers in a neat little pile on the desk.

Duncan watches him before rubbing tiredly behind his glasses. Then he pushes them up his face, out of the way and then it’s one step, two steps, three steps and a half before he is grabbing Aiden by the arm and kissing him, hard, shoving him flush against the blackboard where Aiden’s back slams with a solid thump. His shoulder rubs up against the chalky surface of the green slate, erasing today’s lessons. A knee insinuates itself between his legs, and then Duncan’s other hand is cupping his cheek, bare and warm to the touch if slightly damp with sweat and smelling of cigarettes. 

It’s a weird sensation, nothing like how Aiden had imagined at all, but so much more at the same time. Duncan has stubble that scrapes over Aiden’s skin, catching on his own, but his lips are soft and warm.

“You’re not wearing your gloves,” Aiden says in the half-second Duncan pulls back to peer into his face. His thumb presses down on Aiden’s bottom lip, tracing the outline, moving to the corner to keep Aiden’s lips parted. 

Duncan’s expression is almost fond; it’s easier to read him without his glasses shielding his eyes. “Like I said, I’m off the clock.” 

“Of course,” Aiden says, and Duncan kisses him again, slow and deep, the kind of kiss that would make a nun blush and put seasoned prostitutes to shame. It’s wet, thorough with tongue and teeth, and it makes Aiden’s knees buckle underneath him and he’d stumble like a newborn colt if it weren’t for Duncan holding him up with a firm hand, keeping him in place.

Aiden moans, loud enough to fill the room with it when Duncan’s knee presses forward and stays tightly put.

Duncan’s breath is low and hot when he pulls away the second time. He stares straight at him without blinking and Aiden can feel himself flushing to the root of his hair, feel himself getting hard. His upper lip itches from the tender friction of Duncan’s moustache. His whole body is trembling; he’s dizzy from trying to catch his breath.

“What was that,” Aiden gasps, grabbing onto Duncan’s shoulders and hanging on, heady with a feeling that’s deeper than arousal. Whatever it is, it clouds his mind and makes it hard for him to think about anything else except for Duncan’s mouth and his fingers where they lock into his hair with the lightest tug.

Duncan’s eyes are hooded. Aiden touches his cheek, scratching a fingernail down the topography of his stubble. He can't stop staring at his mouth. They’re pressed together meaningfully hip to hip, reminding Aiden of the heft of Duncan’s body, of the kind of man he is.

“You look like you wanted me to kiss you,” Duncan says in answer. “I’m not used to persistent boys like you,” he continues.

Aiden snorts. “I’m not a boy. I’m twenty-six.”

“That’s still young.”

“For whom?” Aiden asks. “You?”

Duncan’s grip suddenly turns lax and he calmly takes a step back.

The glasses slide back on. Maybe that had been the wrong thing to say.

“I should go,” Duncan says, with impeccable timing, because Aiden can suddenly hear the wash of conversation outside: students and teachers and parents picking up their kids, the slam of classroom doors. He’d have gotten fired if anyone had walked in on them sooner.

Aiden gazes out the window, remembering where he is with sudden clarity.

“Thanks for coming,” he says, but the bell above the door tinkling is the only response he gets.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Duncan often doesn’t react this way to kissing people, most certainly not young men almost half his age. Kissing is just kissing: a way to keep your mouth occupied while the rest of your body engages in other fun, worthwhile activities. But it’s like a train careening off the side of a cliff or skydiving without a parachute; one look at the stupid boy and Duncan feels the old pang rising inside him like a tide. For the first time in a long time, he is hungry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rating becomes M from hereon out! Most of the tags will start to apply moving forward! 
> 
> Also I find it interesting that in Blood and Chocolate, a character is named Vivian. 
> 
> In 'Polar' there's a character called Vivian too so the Vivian referenced in this chapter is the one played by Katheryn Winnick.

* * *

Duncan has been to a hundred different countries. He remembers each one with a clarity that surprises most people when they ask him about his time in the business and the places he’s been. 

It was in Oslo where he first shot a man; in Harbin, in the middle of a bustling street market surrounded by the stink of freshly gutted fish and steam rising in odious waves from vents in the ground, Duncan had killed a man with his bare hands.

He goes where the job takes him. 

Now and then, he works locally: quick and easy jobs because he’s reached a point in his career that he can afford being selective. He doesn’t know what he’s still doing here in Bucharest but it’s a good place as well as any to bunk down until something or other lands on his plate. 

Duncan takes it for what it is: a reprieve from the jet set life. In the meantime, he catches up on his reading and starts a number of DIY projects. The apartment he rents has been paid for in cash for the next six months. It’s a mid-rise building in a neighbourhood of other mid-rises, painted beige in an attempt to modernise and blend in with its surroundings. 

There was furniture when he first moved in—an old TV, chairs and table in the kitchen, a sagging couch with the stuffing bleeding out from the armrests—but he buys himself a new mattress after the bed gives him back pain for two straight days. He doesn’t bother with the rest of the apartment because he’s always been a man who prefers utilitarian furnishings. There’s a shelf to house his books, and he requisitions an old writing desk from the spare bedroom to use as a workbench.

He doesn’t cook; he’s never had the patience. Every second evening when he’s not running errands for Blut and keeping tabs on the man’s enemies, he pays the corner store a visit and stocks up on soup and microwavable dinners. Sometimes when he’s feeling whimsical, he goes to the ramen place nearby, sits on a stool at the bar, and orders a big bowl of noodles with tonkatsu and two eggs. Still: there’s no beating the ones he had in Ginza where he trailed a diplomat for well over two weeks.

He takes two sleeping pills that night, and wakes up with a dry throat and the sound of television static, the room bathed in cold blue light. He turns the TV off and lights a cigarette, smoking it by the open window. He doesn’t know what time it is because he keeps forgetting to buy batteries for the clock on the nightstand, but it’s still dark and the street below is silent. 

It’s a good neighbourhood; there’s a school within walking distance and a farmer’s market opens every weekend just fifteen minutes on foot. 

In another life, Duncan would have hated it here, because it’s the kind of life he fought tooth and nail to avoid. He thinks about that sometimes, about how things could have turned out differently for him. If he hadn’t made the choices he had; if he hadn’t picked up his first gun. His life isn’t all intrigue and debauchery all the time; there are complications too like any other job. 

Not everyone has the stomach for it, most quit after the first month or fall on the wayside. But that’s what the training is for though no one ever tells you that and you don’t find out until the end: no one is ever built to take pain.

* * *

Life moves differently when he’s not on the clock. 

It takes some getting used to, to settle into the humdrum of everyday routine but after you’ve weathered the worst of the bad dreams and drunk yourself into oblivion, then there’s nothing to it and it’s like learning the steps to a rather complicated dance. Backwards and forwards and even with your eyes closed and Duncan makes good time of it until he’s called on again to take care of very specific people. 

Duncan used to dread vacation time. It’s company policy to give them paid time off, a cruel joke as if anyone knows how to be a normal person anymore outside killing people, blowing stuff up, and destabilising governments. 

More than half of them are former military grunts with some form of PTSD and a drug dependence. Plenty of Duncan’s colleagues have died either because they were too coked out of their mind to do their job properly or because they succumbed to diseases born of their bad habits.

But Duncan’s vices are simple: a good book, menthol cigarettes, building something with his hands because he used to want to be a carpenter when he was a boy.

And maybe it’s a sign of getting older but there’s something to be said about having the freedom of going places and doing things just because you feel like it. There are no files to obsessively pore over, or schedules to keep. No one to report to every twelve hours after sticking a knife down a man’s gut. He goes to sleep at whatever time he pleases; he eats food he made for himself. Granted, that’s often ready-made food from a can or a box, that he eats standing up in his underwear, but he likes that he has the luxury to make the decision between lasagna or baked macaroni on any given night.

Sometime when he was busy jetting off to distant places under various aliases and poisoning heads of states, someone had come up with a hundred different kinds of microwavable dinners.

When all is said and done, people like him are just that: people. They still need to pay their taxes, they still have marital problems, there’s still cutlery and kitchenware to be bought and mattresses to be replaced and grime to be scrubbed from the kitchen floors of rented apartments. Working the trade doesn’t suddenly erase all that. There’s life or whatever’s left of it left to endure.

Porter will often tease him when he gets into his cleaning moods because he can’t fathom what Duncan finds more appealing about getting beer stains out of the carpet than a smoke-filled bar where there’s always a beautiful woman at every corner offering to buy you a drink. But a man’s home is where he lays his head to rest, and unlike Porter, Duncan actually prefers his with a semblance of order, never mind the errant ashtray on occasion or the constant disappearance of his socks in the washing machine. 

So Duncan cleans, obsessively. Wipes his blinds and fixes the shutters and builds a secret storage in his closet for his guns. When there’s nothing left to take apart and tinker with, he maps the streets of Bucharest on foot, going to bookstores, or feeding ducks in the park. He goes to cafes to drink his coffee and read the newspaper front to back; he gets his hair trimmed at a barbershop and has the barber groom his moustache. He follows a beautiful boy home one night as the boy is returning from another one of his odd part-time jobs, and watches as the light in his window stays on for half the night before the boy shuts it off before bed.

Duncan makes himself invisible, just another face in the crowd; in this city, he can be anyone.

* * *

There’s a job in Volgograd. 

It involves a Russian bureaucrat, his errant mistress, and the combinations to a secret safe. Duncan hates Russia with a fury that Blut finds curiously endearing, for reasons that can be attributed to his no doubt perverse nature. Duncan’s worked enough jobs in the country that laying low becomes an exercise in subterfuge. Not that he has any problem with keeping a low profile but he could do without all the costume changes. He’ll put his foot down on shaving his moustache though, and only agrees to do the job because it involves a fat paycheck. 

Duncan rents a motel in the outskirts of the city, the kind where they don’t keep a paper trail as long as you pay cash upfront and all manner of illegal activity goes unchecked in every room. There are mice running through the pipes in the ceiling. The phone in his room isn’t plugged in.

Duncan’s Russian is flawless. He answers to the name Orlov and takes leisurely walks down the avenue, shading his face from the wintry sun with the brim of his hat. The man he’s trailing is one Alexei Rothko who takes his mistress out to dinner every Friday night at the Saratov Hotel. Duncan has memorised all the details of this man’s file short of knowing when he shits and eats. He could always trust the dossier, but he likes to be thorough and prefers to do things old school. 

There’s something to be said about getting to know your mark, like trying on new clothes or engaging a potential suitor. 

Besides, files only cover the surface-level stuff; all bullet points and statistics. It won’t tell you if your mark has a great left hook or if he keeps a gun in the drawer next to the bed.

There’s a misconception that Duncan’s job involves nothing more than knowing where the human body’s weak points are. And sure, that’s part of it, and you better have great aim and know when to duck and run, but then there’s still paperwork because it’s still first and foremost a business, and nobody ever talks about the amount of waiting both on the job and in between.

It used to make Duncan anxious, the waiting, but two decades on the job will wean you off the nerves. These days, before a job, Duncan gets restless like an addict off meth.

So: he goes running. 

When he was thirty-five and the cockiest motherfucker anyone had ever had the displeasure of knowing, he would hit the bottle like a lifelong alcoholic. But it compromised his ability to make sound decisions and shoot straight so he switched drinking for a different vice: cigarettes. 

These days, smoking is just something he does, like breathing or taking a dump, so Duncan pulls on a hoodie over his undershirt, a pair of long athletic pants, some good shoes, then takes off to the park. 

It’s five AM and the trails are empty. Mist clings sharply to the air and he feels it with every deep inhale, an aching sting in his lungs that reminds him he’s alive. Goosebumps rise along his arms for the first ten minutes, and then he’s sweating, his movements picking up speed, body warming from the exercise. He licks his lips and tastes salt.

When the sun comes up, he slows down and circles back to the park. He seats himself by the fountain, watching the flurry of activity around him: dog-walkers and mothers pushing their kids in strollers, birds pecking their way closer and closer. As he tugs his hoodie off, he becomes slowly aware of a pain in his stomach. 

When he looks down, he sees a bloom of blood. 

* * *

Duncan is not a sentimental person. In his line of work, sentimentality can get you killed, or at least tortured for several days in a military bunk and then left for dead in the Gobi desert.

In his defense, he’d been idling in the shop for a while as part of his _research_ and it would have been rude not to buy anything. The shop is patronised by the mark’s mistress, a university professor ten years his junior with the brightest eyes and darkest hair. She’d met Rothko when he’d given a speech at her university. On their fourth date, he took her out to see the ice sculptures by the river.

Duncan follows her into the shop, but keeps his distance. There’s a row of art supplies in front of him: paintbrushes of all sizes, some made with animal hair. He doesn’t touch anything. In his periphery, Rothko’s mistress is making smalltalk with the shop owner, laughing her tinkling laugh and leaning with one elbow on the counter. 

Duncan walks the rows of shelves filled with paper and pen and easels and knickknacks he barely knows the use of. The shop smells like a basement after the rain. It’s quiet; he and the mistress are the only two people there besides the owner. 

“Excuse me.” He glances over his shoulder. 

Rothko’s mistress is petite, and reminds him in more ways than one of someone he knows. He follows her eye line to the shelf in front of him where a number of drawing journals are on display, each bound in dark leather.

She plucks one from the shelf while cutting him a friendly smile. 

“The leather is handmade, very soft. Feel,” she says, and offers it to him to try. She’s right. 

“But the paper is best,” she continues, flipping the journal open carefully. “Very smooth, with a bit of texture. Good for drawing in graphite.” Her smile deepens when Duncan gives in and touches his fingers to the grainy pages. Briefly, he thinks of Aiden and the drawings pinned to the wall of his apartment, the clear line work in them, scenes from everyday life.

Duncan returns her smile out of politeness and then she goes on her way. He watches her leave with her purchases tucked under one arm. He lingers in the shop for a while longer.

* * *

Duncan shows up at Aiden’s doorstep two days after a red eye flight from Moscow. 

It took a lot of hemming and hawing, and following Aiden around while he went about his day: idling in cafés, drinking overpriced coffee and sneaking into churches long after the sun has set. He’s surprisingly easy to keep tabs on which is both convenient and worrying. He has a favourite café on Calea Griviței, a sort of coffeeshop/bistro that caters to the young and English-speaking subset. On weekends he sets up shop in Izvor Park to sell drawings and sketch portraits of passersby.

Duncan stops abruptly once he realises what he’s doing, because he may have a body count than there are seats in the British parliament, but he won’t resort to stalking. He tells himself it’s just research; that it’s _always_ research. His kind can’t help their natural suspicion of everyone they come across.

Contract killers are the type to hold grudges after all, which means they can be petty sons of bitches; true especially of the younger ones who still feel like they have something to prove though hardly anyone is keeping score. People like Duncan, who were already making their mark long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, just want to get the job done as cleanly as possible and then go home. He doesn’t have time to go on personal missions for revenge; that’s just too much paperwork. 

Aiden answers on the sixth knock but keeps the chain latched as he peers through the crack with the darkest scowl Duncan’s ever seen on anyone.

“What do you want?”

“Aiden,” Duncan says curtly, and Aiden’s reflexes splutter as he hurries to unlock the chain and throw the door wide open. This would be concerning if Duncan were actually here to kill him. Aiden knows, at this point, the kind of work Duncan does, and yet he keeps welcoming him with open arms, initiating kisses, even inviting him to his place of employ where there are children.

How did this boy even survive a year in Bucharest?

Aiden sniffles, tucking his head into his elbow to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. His eyes look watery, his gaze wavering. “What are you doing here, Duncan?”

_What indeed._

“Is that for me?” Aiden points to the gift-wrapped box in Duncan’s hand. _Ah_ , Duncan thinks, as he hands it over. Now it’s his turn to feel awkward. If he had been twenty years younger, he would have flashed Aiden his most lecherous grin and asked him whether he was going to invite him in or not. He would have fucked Aiden already. _Twice_. Once on that night the silly boy had invited him up to his apartment, and then again when they had bumped into each other at the hardware store, taking him back to his place to test the give of his new mattress. Made sure Aiden remembered, because the Black Kaiser never lets anyone forget. 

But Duncan’s passed the point of posturing— it’s so tedious, and he’s forty-eight, his eyesight is shit— so he just decides to be honest: 

“Yes.”

Aiden looks at him with open suspicion; it makes Duncan smile. 

“Right. Well come in then,” Aiden says, still suspicious, pushing himself off the doorjamb to let Duncan through. He’s only got a t-shirt on and a pair of grey sweatpants; no shoes on, just socks. His hair is a strangled mess, the back flat where he must have been sleeping on it.

“Sorry—I wasn’t expecting company so I uh, forgot to tidy up.” Aiden palms the back of his neck and then the rest of his face before flicking his gaze up to sheepishly meet Duncan’s. “Also, I’ve got like, this really bad cold so I was just sleeping all day.” He lets out an explosive sneeze right on cue, grimacing and shuddering. “Sorry.” He turns away and makes a half-hearted attempt to organise the mess. 

Duncan watches him stuff things back into their hiding places: sheaves of drawings left out on the desk, unwashed mugs of coffee and paint, a heap of dirty laundry which he ferries from one corner of the apartment to another. As usual, he has to wend his way through the minefield of pots and pans on the floor, left unattended like sleeping animals.

“I can leave,” Duncan says after a moment.

Aiden snorts, then huffs, pausing as he rights a pillow on the unmade bed to cast Duncan a bitter look. “You always leave.”

“Do you want me to stay,” Duncan asks, surprising himself with the question because he meant to say something else. “If you want me to, I will.”

“I do,” Aiden says. 

Duncan wonders how he’d ended up here, letting himself be swayed by a boy with the softest mouth he’s ever seen. He is not a man easily given to fantasy, but if he were… well, if he were, he’d wonder what else about Aiden is soft and when he would be allowed to kiss him again.

“I’ll make you tea.” Duncan looks up from where he’s narrowly avoided kicking over one of Aiden’s pans. “Scratch that, I drank all of it. I have whiskey from before?”

“Whiskey’s fine.”

“Must be five o’clock somewhere, right?” Aiden grins, conjuring the aforementioned bottle of whiskey in short order as well as two short glasses which he wipes with a faded rag before setting down on the kitchen counter. He has a generous pour; for a while that’s the only sound in the apartment, apart from the clink of glasses and the soft thumping in the ceiling as Aiden’s neighbours tread on their floorboards. 

It’s a dump as far as apartments go but Duncan’s bunked in far worse and he knows that home is where you make it, anywhere you choose. At least there are curtains.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Duncan nudges his present across the table. He wasn’t going to wrap it, but had changed his mind on the way over, and had the lady at the store decide what colour ribbon and paper to use. 

“Later.” Aiden stares at his drink and then at Duncan, leaning his hip against the counter. “Maybe,” he hums against the rim of his glass, before tipping the rest of his drink back with a wince. His cheeks are noticeably flushed with signs of a fever. He probably shouldn’t be drinking.

Aiden takes the box and tugs lightly at the ribbon for a moment, blue, which seems rather fitting because it’s the same colour as his eyes. Duncan can’t believe he’s thinking about stupid shit like this, like eye colours and ribbons like some kind of sentimental sap, but it’s been a while since anyone had looked at him like Aiden has: without fear or judgment like he’s just the man Aiden wanted to see. Maybe Aiden just doesn’t know any better; Americans can be so trusting. 

Aiden seats himself at the end of the bed, looking like he’s debating whether or not to open the present.

“All right.” He wipes his hands on his thighs. “Here we go.” But instead of continuing, he tosses the box aside and lunges so he can grab Duncan by the front of his shirt. Duncan lets it happen; he may be older but he has faster reflexes and if he didn’t want this to happen then he could have just ducked out of the way or grabbed both of Aiden’s wrists.

Aiden kisses him desperately, their teeth knocking together, an echo of their first kiss by the swings when Aiden had tried the same surprise tactic. He clearly lacks a strategy, the poor boy; Duncan takes pity on him and kisses back, first perfunctorily and then licking into Aiden’s hot mouth while Aiden shudders and groans. 

With his other hand, he touches the back of Aiden’s neck, runs his knuckles down his spine, then pushes his palm flat against the boy’s lower back. Every move draws a tiny, involuntary sound from him, and Duncan is almost surprised when Aiden is the first to pull away.

“Sorry,” he says, flushing. He sniffs, scrubbing a hand over his face again. 

“It’s fine,” Duncan says. 

Aiden huffs, then he kisses Duncan again, whining this time and absolutely shameless with it, letting their bodies grind with just the slightest bit of friction before he tugs Duncan over to the bed where his present is momentarily forgotten, kicked aside in favour of a more productive use of their time. 

Duncan would be offended—he watches grimly over Aiden’s shoulder as the box skids across the floor halfway across the room— but then he moves on quickly from it because kissing Aiden takes precedence over everything, requiring both concentration and a calculated loss of control Duncan would normally find disconcerting if he wasn’t desperate himself. 

Duncan often doesn’t react this way to kissing people, most certainly not young men almost half his age. Kissing is just kissing: a way to keep your mouth occupied while the rest of your body engages in other fun, worthwhile activities. But it’s like a train careening off the side of a cliff or skydiving without a parachute; one look at the stupid boy and Duncan feels the old pang rising inside him like a tide. For the first time in a long time, he is _hungry_.

So Duncan pins Aiden down against the flimsy mattress, rakes his fingers through the mess of his hair and swallows down every one of his trembling sighs. Aiden feels so good underneath him, so responsive, like he’d smile as he let Duncan do whatever he wanted with him. Like he’d even thank him for it in the aftermath. A needy, sweet little thing. 

Duncan hasn’t been with anyone in decades, unless you count quick hand jobs in back alley gambling dens, and he hasn’t fucked anyone in close to three years out of sheer paranoia they would knife him in his sleep. And it probably shows: he’s hard already from just kissing Aiden, growling and kneeing the boy’s legs apart so he can slot their erections _just so_ and thrust down. 

They both groan. Aiden tips his head back, clenching his teeth and baring the curve of his throat. Duncan curls a hand over it, over his Adam’s apple bobbing with every panting swallow, his thumb stroking Aiden’s pulse. This is dangerous; Aiden shouldn’t have him in his bed when he doesn’t know what Duncan is truly capable of. 

“You still think I’m too young for you?” Aiden asks slyly, when Duncan leans back to study his face, his kiss-bitten lips and his fevered eyes. It takes him a moment to catch his breath.

Duncan grunts and is saved from giving any sort of meaningful response when Aiden suddenly ducks to the side and sneezes. Again, then again. Then once more for the fourth time. “Fuck,” he groans, voice clogged and whiny. “I hate this.” He twists himself out of Duncan’s grip to pluck a wad of tissues from the nightstand before blowing his nose with a scowl. “Sorry.”

Duncan watches him in amusement. He pulls himself in an upright position, one foot braced on the floor. The bed is a double, which means it barely fits two grown men. Aiden half-crawls out of it to reach for his present lying forgotten on the floor. The position tempts Duncan for a moment—it would be so easy to just reach over and cup his ass—but the opportunity passes as Aiden resurfaces with the most manic of grins.

“Let’s see what you got me then.” He holds the box to his ear before giving it a vigorous shake.

“Aiden,” Duncan says. “Just open it.”

Aiden laughs, then tears through the wrapping paper like a little kid on Christmas morning. There’s a lengthy pause as he examines the heft of the drawing journal in one hand then another. He doesn’t say anything for a long time, just traces the leather cover with two fingers, reverent and almost shy.

“Thought you were getting me a sex toy or something,” he mutters, sounding peeved.

That was not the reaction Duncan was expecting. But then his initial plan had been to drop off the present and then leave without another word. He hasn’t thought that far. “Would you have preferred a sex toy?” he asks. 

Aiden scoffs, then scowls at him. It’s an endearing look, particularly because it makes him resemble a disgruntled kitten. Aiden leans his weight against him, shoulder pressing against Duncan’s, the action startling in its casual intimacy.

“I was joking. This is… _fine_. I like it. No, _I love it_.” He presses his cheek to the soft pages, smiling. Aiden has fine eyelashes, and there are faint echoes of freckles across his cheek only visible from a certain distance. “No one’s ever bought me anything in a while,” he says. 

“No one?” Duncan prompts.

Aiden chews on his thumbnail, shrugging. “I move around a lot. It makes it hard to make friends long enough to necessitate… _gifts_.”

Duncan knows the feeling all too well. He owns homes under several different aliases that he rents out in the interim because the thought of settling down anywhere sends him running for the hills. Suburbia for him will be like a slow, painful death, the kind that’s akin to being starved in a makeshift jail cell while made to listen to the steady drip of a water pipe just out of reach.

“Plus, I have my own toys anyway,” Aiden adds quickly, waiting, it seems, for Duncan to say something about it. 

Duncan stares. He doesn’t know how to respond to that except to burst into laughter. Aiden lifts his head in surprise, and he grins when their gazes meet and lock. 

“I can show you,” Aiden offers, tentative, raising both his eyebrows. 

“Maybe some other time.” 

“Yeah,” Aiden agrees tonelessly. He lapses into another sneezing fit. Duncan squeezes his knee without thinking about it.

“You all right?”

Aiden shakes his head. He digs at his eyelid with the heel of his hand, rubbing until the skin around his eye socket goes pink. “Do you mind if I took a nap? My head is killing me and I just took a Nyquil before you got here.”

Duncan makes to leave, but it’s the plaintive look that Aiden sends him that stops him dead in his tracks. 

“Actually, I’d really like it if you didn’t go,” Aiden says. “Unless you have somewhere else to be?” He tilts his head to one side, leaning back on his palms, widening his eyes. His knees are tipped open, wide enough to be inviting, but not on purpose—at least Duncan doesn’t think so—and it’s only later that it hits him that these are calculated gestures; Aiden isn’t stupid; he knows his own appeal. 

“No,” Duncan says. “I don’t.”

“Then stay.” Aiden scoots over to make room for him. There’s only one pillow and the sheets are rumpled, the corner of the cover peeled back to reveal a triangle of mattress. The bed smells like him, like the mineral scent of his skin and sweat.

It doesn’t take too long before Aiden falls asleep, curled into himself like a comma with his back to Duncan. His shirt rides up at the back but Duncan doesn’t touch him. Instead, he gets up from the bed and takes stock of the apartment: the long row of drawings taped to the wall, some water spotted and done in charcoal, images of busy Romanian streets and architecture done in the Brâncovenesc style as well as portraits of smiling strangers.

There’s nothing in the fridge, just some fizzy water and expired cheese. The sink is overflowing with dishes. In a glass jar by the kitchen window is a stem of English Ivy already starting to wilt. Duncan takes care of the dishes first, shrugging out of his coat and leaving it to drape across the back of a chair because there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to hang it. He leaves the apartment for the corner store, then takes a detour to the pharmacy. When he returns, careful not to wake Aiden with the jangle of keys at the door, the apartment is the same as he’d left it: still and silent.

It’s when he’s filling a kettle with water for tea that Aiden actually does wake from his nap, blinking up at him like a baby bird.

“Is it just me or did you clean my apartment while I was asleep? _What the hell._ ”

Duncan shrugs. “I wanted to keep busy,” he says, evenly, because this is at least partly true; he didn’t want to just stare at Aiden sleeping. He’s a man still unused to sitting still, hence the number of woodworking projects in his apartment, taking up residence.

“Do you feel well enough? I made you soup.”

Aiden blinks. “Right. Soup,” he says, as he pads barefoot to the kitchen, scratching his ass. 

It’s nothing much—just soup straight from the can that Duncan heated up in a pot. 

Aiden’s expression is a mix of bafflement and fondness when he peers into the steaming bowl. “Alphabet soup, really?”

“I was going to arrange the letters to spell out your name but it turns out there weren’t enough vowels.”

“Thanks,” Aiden laughs, flushing to the tips of his ears. He sniffs a few times but manages to hold back a sneeze. He’d slept for almost two straight hours, muttering while he dreamt, the sleep of the road weary. Nothing could have woken him. His face was scrunched up the entire time. It was difficult not to want to wake him, or touch him. 

“This is great. You didn’t have to, you know.”

“Ah, but I wanted to,” Duncan tells him, flicking him a smile.

Aiden snorts. There’s that look again on his face but it disappears just as quickly as the first time. He swallows a spoonful of soup, then another, and another. In the meantime, Duncan turns the stove off as soon as the kettle starts whistling and takes two mugs from the cabinet, both chipped. One is red and missing a handle. The other has ‘SLUT’ bubble printed on it, pink letters against a white backdrop. He doesn’t ask questions. 

He tears open two packets of earl grey tea, the only kind they had at the store though Duncan prefers oolong, dunks his bag in hot water until some minutes have passed and he can take a sip. He forgot to buy milk. 

“I got that as a consolation prize from quiz night,” Aiden mumbles, keeping his gaze trained on the wall and resolutely not meeting Duncan’s. He jerks his chin towards the mug in question which Duncan has decided to utilise for himself if only to make Aiden blush. “It’s a long story.”

“I’m sure it’s a fascinating one as well.”

Aiden slurps his soup. “Yeah, well. Not really. Apparently, I ambushed one of the judges during a bathroom break and promised to give him a lap dance if he ever let us win. I was drunk, couldn’t remember a thing, and we only won second place but at least I got a free mug.” 

“It’s a very nice mug,” Duncan says reasonably. “Sturdy.”

“Oh, my god. _Shut up_.”

“You don’t think so?” Duncan runs a thumb over the lettering. 

“I promise I’m not always like that when I’m drunk. I know how to behave.” 

“Do you?” Duncan asks. 

“You doubt it?”

Duncan pretends to think about it for a moment. “Well, you can be very outspoken.”

“So what you’re saying is I’m a brat.”

“Your words,” Duncan reminds him. “Not mine.”

Aiden cradles his mug, long fingers spidered over the rim. He hums. “Thanks for the tea,” he says, before lifting it in cheers. 

“You’re welcome,” Duncan replies, lifting his own to meet it.

Neither of them says anything for a while. Aiden eats his soup and Duncan tips his chair back and closes his eyes, listening to the wash of sound coming from the street outside: cars honking their horns, kids shouting and laughing. Somewhere, a dog barks, and Duncan can hear the familiar jingle of an ice cream truck as it drives past.

At the last minute, Duncan gives in to the temptation of watching Aiden from the corner of his eye. He hasn’t taken care of anyone in a long time, but it’s nice to know he hasn’t forgotten how.

* * *

“Look, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but I think you’re scaring away my customers.”

Duncan looks up from his newspaper to cast a level look at Aiden. Perfect day for a stroll at the park so he’d ventured out and gone for a walk. If he’d known Aiden would be here too then that’s just a matter of coincidence. Bucharest is a small city. Smaller if you have a mental grid of the city already stamped onto your subconscious and happen to be keeping tabs on a particular person. 

There are almost a dozen parks in Bucharest but only one that Aiden visits with such frequency. 

“Why would you think that I was scaring away your customers?” Duncan asks calmly. 

“Well, maybe not purpose,” Aiden says, taking the recently vacated seat next to him. “But it’s already noon and not one person’s asked me to draw them a portrait yet. Not one! Ever since you got here!”

“Maybe it’s just a slow day.”

“Maybe,” Aiden agrees, but he doesn’t seem convinced. “But you’re also scary as fuck. You give off this menacing aura. No offence.”

“This is just what my face looks like,” Duncan says. “I can’t help it.”

“I was kidding.” Aiden scrunches his nose. “Maybe.”

Duncan goes back to his reading. He makes it to the second paragraph before Aiden tugs his newspaper out of the way. His face looms above Duncan’s, warm and pink from sitting out in the sun. The weather had been temperate this morning, unseasonable considering it’s almost November, but now the sky has turned a murky colour and it’ll only be a matter of time before it starts to rain.

“You should let me draw you,” Aiden says.

“Sure.” Duncan folds his newspaper in half. “If you want.”

“As a way to make up for all the business I’ve lost,” Aiden continues.

The park isn’t quite as busy because it’s a weekday and most people are at work. There are a few people idling here and there, talking on their phones or doing yoga. Duncan makes a show of looking left and right before raising both of his eyebrows at Aiden.

“What are your rates?”

Aiden gives him a figure. 

Duncan forces himself to keep a neutral face. “That seems exorbitant,” he says, on account of the number of zeros Aiden had tacked on, but he’s only teasing, and he agrees to let Aiden draw him. 

“Are you going to make me look younger?” Duncan crosses one leg over the other, leaning back to spread his arms across the bench.

“What?”Aiden asks. “No, why would I do that? You look good for your age.” A pause. “I didn’t mean it like that, like you’re old or something.”

“I am.”

Aiden ignores him. “I just meant I like you as you are now.”

“You like me,” Duncan says. He’s still teasing, of course, but mostly it’s so he can mask his astonishment. He’s not used to being openly _liked,_ desired, maybe, because desire is easy and some people get their rocks off knowing they got close to the Black Kaiser, enough to fuck him, but even those people think he’s a bit of an asshole and only tolerate him because of the stories they could tell their friends. 

Aiden crumples a piece of paper in a fist and tosses it half-heartedly in his direction. It bounces past Duncan’s head, missing his ear only because he had anticipated its trajectory.

“Take your glasses off,” he says. 

“What else?”

“Well, unless you want me to paint you like Kate Winslet then I suggest you keep everything else on.”

“Are you nervous?” Duncan asks, because Aiden keeps fidgeting and pushing his hair back from his face. “You’ve drawn me before.”

“Yeah, well, that I drew for myself for free.” Aiden selects a pencil from a zippered canvas pouch, twirling it between his fingers with a faraway look. “This I’m drawing for money. So: pressure.”

“I’m sure it’ll be great.”

“I know it’ll be great,” Aiden says cockily. “But I want to make sure you’ll get your money’s worth. Glasses, please.”

Duncan puts them away. He kept accidentally sitting on and breaking them so he bought himself a chrome case. Porter had called him a big nerd when he saw it, but Porter is also fucking retirees in Florida so what does he know about anything. 

Aiden studies him with a thoughtful expression, drumming his pencil against the back of his lips. He has a lot of nervous tics like that: he squirms when he’s embarrassed, touches the back of his neck or swipes a thumb over his lips in one, two passes. When he smiles and means it, he lets his teeth show, though sometimes he ducks his head. He wears his emotions plain on his face. If Duncan had met him in less friendly circumstances, he’d be dead by now. He’s too malleable, too trusting. But then, Duncan thinks, so are most people his age who didn’t spend their adult lives learning how to turn their body into a weapon.

The wind picks up, sending sheets of Aiden’s sketches fluttering. Aiden yelps as he hurries to collect them, and then there’s the first pelt of rain as the skies open to pour torrents. 

Duncan watches a drop of rain slide down Aiden’s nose and onto his lips. 

“Shit!” Aiden exclaims, but he’s laughing even as he runs for cover. 

Duncan helps him pack up before the weather makes a turn for the worse: the easel, the tip jar, the sheaves of paper and the pencils of varying sharpness and length, all fit into a weathered green messenger bag. They take shelter under the awning of a café, huddled with other pedestrians waiting out the rain. Aiden scoots backwards so his shoulder knocks against Duncan’s chest. His hair is longer at the back, curling in dark ringlets. He smells like rain laced with sweat. 

“Shame I never got to finish your drawing. You know, because of the rain,” he says.

“I live not far from here,” Duncan offers before he knows what he’s saying.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

So they take a taxi to his apartment. It’s a short drive and even when traffic is choking into motion, they arrive in no time at all. Duncan lives on the fourth floor. Because it’s a mid-rise, there are no lifts and Aiden complains about this the whole climb up the four flights of stairs.

Inside, toeing off his damp shoes and shrugging out of his jacket, Aiden lets out an appreciative whistle. He’s the first person Duncan’s invited over since he chose Bucharest as a place to lay low, and if he were any other person he’d be embarrassed about the sparseness of it all. He can afford better and more comfortable furniture, but there’s no point when he’s only going to get a few uses out of it. 

Aiden starts walking from room to room, spreading his arms out to a T to indicate the breadth of the space. It’s only a two-bedroom but for someone who’s been living in a cramped little apartment in the more questionable part of town, it’s probably the height of luxury.

“Wow. Look at the size of this place.”

Aiden picks up a crystal ashtray—the previous tenants had left it, if it were up to Duncan he’d just use whatever was lying around— squeezes it and then puts it back down. 

“Your whole living room is the size of my apartment. I guess you can afford all of this with the money you make killing—” He stops, catching himself, and throws Duncan an apologetic look. 

Duncan hands him a towel without another word. He’s not offended; they both know what he does for a living. Because yes, it’s illegal and morally questionable, but there’s no denying that the money is good and it’s the only job he knows how to do with some competence. 

“I’d give you a tour but there’s nothing much to see.”

“I wanna see your bathroom.”

Duncan flicks Aiden a patient look. 

He shows Aiden, in the end. Again: nothing to write home about, a tub he doesn’t use, a shower that he does. Because he’s lived his life as a permanent bachelor, there are wet towels on the floor. The guest room is next. The spare bed is stripped bare of sheets, he didn’t bother with curtains, and Aiden laughs when he sees the birdhouse. Or rather: the pile of them. 

“I thought you were kidding about the birdhouse.” He runs a finger over a spot on the gabled roof that Duncan had missed painting. “And you made…nine of them. _Nine_. What were you going to do with them? You don’t have a garden. You don’t have birds.”

“I could buy some,” Duncan amends. Both a house with a garden and some birds, maybe those small yellow ones. He could. But then he’d never actually do it because he hates being responsible for anyone’s life but his own and all that open space will make him feel nauseous. He’d be leaving himself vulnerable to an attack and then where would he be. Rosebushes don’t deflect bullets as well as concrete. 

“Is this something you like to do,” Aiden asks. “You know, outside work?” He means the birdhouses, of course.

Duncan thinks about it. It’s just something to do with his hands because he hates being idle in between jobs. He’d gotten the idea from a magazine. “Maybe,” he says.

“Are you always this cryptic?”

“Not always.”

“Where’s your bedroom?” Aiden asks abruptly, the sudden shift making Duncan’s head spin. But he wouldn’t be the Black Kaiser if he didn’t learn how to adapt to any given situation and so he uncurls himself from his lean against the wall and points down the hallway. 

Aiden bounds inside as soon as the door opens with all the excitement of a puppy unleashed. Duncan becomes keenly aware of the fact that they are within proximity of a bed—his to be exact, the covers made with military precision—and that they’re alone and he just essentially invited this stupid American boy here. _To the wolf’s den._ And he feels himself balk at his own unkind language: Aiden is not stupid. He just does what he wants, even if it means making questionable choices like following a man like Duncan to his apartment.

“You know you’re a lot different from how I imagined you,” Aiden says, seating himself on the armchair by the window where Duncan would spend many nights reading or chain-smoking. His legs are splayed open; his left sock has a tiny but visible hole in the toe. 

“You’ve imagined me?”

“You know what I mean.” Aiden rolls his eyes, poking at the armrest cover already coming apart at the seams. “I thought your house would have all these elaborate traps or something. Infrared. Rigged explosives.”

“I save that kind of thing for my Montana address,” Duncan says wryly.

Aiden whistles. “So no guns huh?” 

“I don’t carry a gun all the time; I’d get arrested.” 

“But then how do you—” Aiden raises his eyebrows meaningfully. 

Duncan sighs. “There are plenty of other ways to kill a man.” Poison, a pen knife, your bare hands—really whatever was available. You could kill a person with a stapler and a piece of string if you were really creative. Hell, Duncan had bludgeoned a man to death with a wall-mounted trout once. “I’m only armed when I’m on the clock.” Well, that’s mostly true. Duncan still has his body which he can use to his advantage. Also: his favourite knife tucked into his boot.

“Is that why you don’t always wear the gloves?”

Aiden is staring at him. His cheeks are flushed again, his gaze almost coy. Duncan’s never really thought about his gloves in any other context; they hide his prints from authorities, they keep his hands warm, and yes, maybe, they’re a little stylish, but they go well with the rest of this clothing because he wears nothing but black anyway, a sartorial choice that also serves a particular purpose. Black hides blood stains; black blends in the dark.

“I think you should wear them,” Aiden says, all too casually. “For the drawing.”

“I thought it was going to be a portrait?”

“I changed my mind,” Aiden smiles.

* * *

Vivian calls on a Wednesday. “I have a job for you,” she says, no preamble. “Where are you?”

Duncan gives her his post box number. He still doesn’t believe in e-mail no matter that they’re living in the twenty-first century. He has a work-issued laptop, but it’s not connected to the internet and he only uses it to access client information given to him on a thumb drive and the occasional game of solitaire. 

“You’re a dinosaur, Duncan. A relic of an age gone by. If you weren’t so good, you’d have been put to an early retirement.”

“I just prefer pen and paper is all.”

“I could have sworn you had a predisposition to stone tablets.” 

Duncan doesn’t rise to the bait. 

“Call me when you get the file,” Vivian says. “Or send a carrier pigeon. Fuck, I don’t know. Just don’t lose this number.”

She disconnects the call before he can give her a cutting reply. In the background, he’d heard the whirr of an engine and the sound of another woman’s laugh.

Sometimes there’s a lull between jobs; other times work just follows him everywhere like a hound dog that won’t stop nipping at his heels. Duncan checks his PO BOX for the next two days. On the third day, the file arrives in a neat brown envelope addressed to a D. Viz. He frowns at the terrible handwriting but takes it home nonetheless. 

This is life in its usual rhythm: researching the job, making arrangements to actually _do_ it. It involves a lot of preparation, more than the casual observer might think. You have to account for everything: if the mark has their own set of bodyguards, or if they actually know how to defend themselves. Duncan only half-trusts the file on a regular day but it does make for good light reading. It’s amazing the amount of stupid stuff that ends up on a person’s file, narrowing them down to their base elements: height, weight, educational attainment, the number of times they paid for sexual services in an underground BDSM club in Rotterdam. Their dependence on antihistamines. 

Duncan kills scumbags for a living, but a handful of times he’s had to kill innocent men. An honest-to-god, pardoning the turn of phrase, priest; an accountant with a bad credit score with a wife and small child; a guy who was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s why it’s best not to ask questions or make assumptions about a mark based on whatever is on their file. Duncan sleeps better that way. A job is a job is a job.

He grabs his coat and duffel, cash stuffed inside socks in a safe he’d installed in his floorboards then heads out. When he opens the door, Aiden is standing there with his hand poised like he’s about to knock. He’s wearing a brown corduroy jacket and the world’s most embarrassed grin, his hair dampened by the weather.

“Your neighbour buzzed me in. Got the wrong apartment number and he thought I was the plumber.” 

“Aiden,” Duncan interrupts him.

Aiden glances at his duffel and coat, puts two and two together and his smile melts like ice cream in the sun. “You going somewhere?”

“I have a flight to catch.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Aiden says, in a way that makes Duncan truly feel the disappointed weight of it. “Well, I won’t be long. I just thought I’d drop your drawing off. I didn’t have your number so I didn’t know how else to reach you. Do you even have a cell phone?”

“I have one for work.”

“Of course you have one for work.”

Duncan lets him inside, tossing his duffel onto the couch but dutifully keeping his coat on lest he forget he has other pressing matters to attend to. He has little time before his flight; at this rate he probably won’t make it to the airport in time. 

Aiden digs through his messenger bag and then pulls out his finished drawing, wrapped in delicate tissue paper and haphazardly tied with a piece of twill, obviously already framed.

Duncan accepts it, feigns elation, though the fondness he feels for the boy is sincere, in that moment. He unwraps the drawing, admiring the shade and the finish, the clear lines on cream paper. Duncan doesn’t have a creative bone in his body—he knows objectively that the appreciation of art requires a depth of character that he doesn’t possess— but he recognises talent when he sees it, and the boy has it in spades. “Thank you,” he says.

Aiden peers over his shoulder expectantly. “Do you like it?” 

“Of course,” Duncan says, honest for once. “I’ll put it on the windowsill next to the dead plant I don’t have.”

Aiden grins. 

Duncan looks at him. He doesn’t do anything else, and just looks. He thinks about the last time that he’s kissed Aiden, the boy’s soft mouth. Then he thinks, fuck it, and walks Aiden backwards until Aiden’s back hits the wall. Aiden melts into him, _absolutely melts_ , his arms winding around Duncan’s neck, his head tipping back to accept Duncan’s open-mouthed kiss, the tension in his shoulders unspooling like a thread. 

The boy lets out a wounded animal noise and he shudders when Duncan slides his hand inside his shirt, untucking it where it sticks to the small of his back. Duncan curls his palm where the skin is damp with sweat, rubbing his thumb over the jut of spine. 

Aiden is warm; he’s warm all over, and his hair smells like mint shampoo. He’s all lean lines and the softest eyes, and his mouth is soft too, wet, so wet, Duncan wants to take him apart, piece by piece.

Aiden licks against his mouth, one hand tight in the lapel of Duncan’s coat, his grip clenching when Duncan makes a fist in his hair. “I thought you’d never—Jesus, it’s just that sometimes it’s like you have the self-control of a saint and it makes it hard to figure out whether you want me or not.”

“You don’t think I do?”

“You’re kind of giving me mixed signals here. I keep throwing myself at you and it’s like, making passes at a tree.”

Duncan is not in the habit of apologising so instead he sheds his coat, hangs it behind a hook on the door and then grabs Aiden under the thighs so he can lift him up and carry him to bed. 

Aiden swears at this show of strength—“What the actual fuck,”— before he just goes along with it and lets himself be handled. He spreads himself against the mattress, with enough sense to kick off his shoes like a good boy and scoot upwards toward the headboard where he rests his arms expansively. “I should really get myself one of these,” he says, running his fingers over the covers. Then to Duncan, his expression impish, “What are you going to do with me, Mr Vizla? I’m all yours.” 

Duncan gives this some thought. He still thinks this is a bad idea, not least because Aiden is far too young for him, but Duncan’s also just a man, and he wouldn’t be in this line of business if he weren’t a little bit depraved. Sometimes Aiden makes a gesture—tilts his head or laughs his boyish laugh or starts chewing on the nub of a pencil—and it’s like a shot of adrenaline straight into his veins. He has to physically stop himself from grabbing Aiden and kneeling him down to fuck his obstinate mouth. 

But Duncan has other plans for him. He’s been patient, kept himself in check with the steely resolve of a goddamn knight in the fucking Crusades that he may as well get a medal for it. 

Aiden’s not exactly been subtle, batting his eyes at him and keeping himself perpetually in Duncan’s orbit. A lesser man would have already ruined him. It would be so easy, especially as this is what Aiden wants anyway: to be ruined. Duncan can do that, he can do so much damage to him, in so many ways that Aiden will be ruined for anyone else after Duncan is done with him. 

“Take your clothes off,” Duncan says, voice tinged with the barest hint of threat to let Aiden know he’s stopped fucking around.

Aiden visibly swallows, fear trickling into his expression before a blink chases it away. He hurries to obey the order, almost elbowing himself in the face with how fast he shucks off his shirt. His belt hits the floor with a dull thud. His pants follow suit but it’s still taking longer than Duncan has actual time for so he grabs Aiden by the waistband of his boxers and just drags it over his ass and thighs.

The fabric gives a resounding rip, Aiden squeaks and flails his arms, but he lets Duncan wrangle him out of his boxers like a spirited colt, all legs. Duncan almost gets a kick in the face for his efforts. 

When Aiden is finally well and truly naked, Duncan finds himself not unsurprisingly out of breath at the sight. Harder too than he can ever remember being in his life, giving him a damn migraine, but that goes without saying. 

Aiden is a vision. If Duncan were a romantic, he’d say Aiden was sculpted lovingly by a benevolent god, everything sinuous from shoulder to waist to the lovely arches of his feet. He has a farmer’s tan already fast fading, and his chest is flushed the same colour as his throat. He keeps himself neatly trimmed, his cock short and fat and canting to the right, already pearling at the head. 

Duncan plants one knee on the bed and Aiden watches him with indolent eyes before reaching down and giving himself a squeeze. 

Duncan catches Aiden’s wrist before he can get any further. He can tighten his grip to make his point but Duncan knows he doesn’t need to; Aiden will do exactly as he says because he’s been wanting this if not his whole life then probably for a long time now: a steady hand, someone to buoy him through the motions of his life. 

Duncan is paid a Queen’s ransom to be a good judge of character; he can get a read on people after only meeting them for the first time. And he knows: the boy is adrift; he needs someone to whom he can relinquish control.

“Did I say you could touch yourself?” 

“No, but I just—”

“You’re not allowed to touch yourself,” Duncan interrupts, and this time he doesn’t shy away from looking his fill: the sweetly peaking nipples, the shadow of hair trailing down his belly button, this beautiful boy who will be his undoing in the end. Who let him run around all of Bucharest, looking like that? Like every one of Duncan’s wet dreams personified?

“On your stomach. Ass up,” Duncan says, and if Aiden has any complaints, he must have swallowed them, because for once he doesn’t say anything, just does as he’s told with more compliance than Duncan is expecting. “Spread your legs.”

A shiver runs through Aiden’s shoulders, and he pauses, fingers clenched on the covers. “Um,” he says uncertainly, peeking over his shoulder at Duncan. 

“Yes?” Duncan prompts with more calmness than he feels. “Do you have something to say, Aiden?”

“Are you going to fuck me?”

“Would you like me to?”

Aiden shivers again, closing his eyes and nodding. “I’d like that,” he says in a small voice, flushing as he ducks his head in embarrassment. 

“Then we’ll see,” Duncan says, “If you’re good then I’ll fuck you.”

“I can be good,” Aiden promises, sounding meek for the first time since Duncan has met him, making himself appear small and therefore appealing to him—another calculated gesture.

“I don’t doubt that you can. Now: ass up.” Duncan grips his flank. He lets his other hand cup Aiden’s ass—round, firm, truly a shame that they’re always hidden by pairs and pairs of ill-fitting paint-spattered jeans. Maybe some other time, Duncan will actually do something about it. Even Aiden’s underwear leave much to be desired, the cotton flimsy and washed out from a white to a dull grey. 

For now though, there’s this: the clock ticking like a metronome, counting down how much time Duncan has left before he misses his flight, and Aiden’s tight little ass squirming in unbridled expectation like the best kind of temptation and distraction both. 

Aiden yelps when Duncan grabs himself a greedy palmful before smacking his ass with just enough pressure to make his back arch. 

Aiden moans. His hole is a small, untouched thing, begging for attention. Duncan parts him open with his thumbs so he can get a better look at him, letting his stubble scrape the trembling insides of Aiden’s thighs as he brushes his lips against the pink little pucker—first with his lips closed, then with them parted to give it a wet, slippery kiss. 

Aiden gasps in shock as Duncan circles his tongue around and around before forcing his way in, one half inch at a time, his thumb keeping Aiden open. 

It’s so easy when Aiden finally relaxes into it, hardly any resistance at all as Duncan works in and out of him with his tongue. Duncan angles it so that his stubble scrapes over where Aiden will be the most sensitive and Aiden moans like a ten dollar hooker, sounding like he’s going to cry. 

When Duncan pulls back, the backs of Aiden’s thighs are pink from friction, his hole shining with fresh spit, his cock leaking clear droplets on the immaculate sheets.

Aiden’s shoulders are slumped forward on the bed, his face buried in his arms, his back an obedient curve. He’s panting; Duncan follows the path of his spine with a fingertip, all the way down to the crack of his ass.

“Have you ever been fingered?” Duncan asks, testing the give with the barest push. 

“You’re really asking me that right now?” Aiden may be indignant, but he’s shaking harder, clenching down on Duncan’s fingertip. He hangs his head, cowed when Duncan slants him a quelling look. “No, it’s kind of personal, but—”

“But you do it to yourself,” Duncan finishes for him.

“Jesus.” Aiden hides his mortified face into the pillows. “Yes, okay, yes, so I like a good fingering every now and then. It helps with the stress.”

Duncan wishes they had done this sooner. He would have bent Aiden over his lap, pants rolled down to the ankles, and fingerfucked him until he came without needing to touch his cock. He would have worked him open with two fingers to start, because Aiden was just the kind of boy who’d need _more_ to ever feel satisfied, and Duncan would be unkind not to give him what he wanted. He’d give him everything he could on a silver platter, cutlery included and the whole damn banquet, and that thought in itself is worrying because Duncan’s lived long enough to know there are some promises you just can’t keep. 

Duncan reaches for the bedside drawer where the bottle of lube lives. Contrary to popular opinion, he is not a robot and did not emerge fully formed into the world, moustache included. He takes care of his needs just like any other person. He has wants, desires; he eats, bleeds, and shits like every man on the street and his uncle. And he fucks, just like the rest of them, only slightly more unhinged.

Aiden turns to face him, one blue eye peeking through the avalanche of curly hair as Duncan wrestles with the cap on the bottle. Duncan ignores the singular urge to kiss him and grips Aiden’s ass cheek instead—small, fitting right into the palm of one hand—before giving it a good squeeze. 

He starts a rhythm with his fingers and soon Aiden is grinding shamelessly into it, writhing backwards and then forwards so he can rub himself all over Duncan’s sheets as well as fuck back against Duncan’s hand, down to the knuckle. 

It’s almost sweet how desperately shameless Aiden is. His cock bobs heavily between his spread thighs, a dripping mess that will be hell to clean off the sheets, but he doesn’t touch himself, no matter how much he wants to. He clutches the sheets, white-knuckled, clenching his teeth when Duncan curls his fingers. His knees are shaking.

“You need this?” Duncan grunts against his ear, leaning over to cover the length of his body with his own, chest to back as he probes him slowly, listening to every hitch of Aiden’s breath. 

Aiden nods, shaking. His hair scratches Duncan’s cheek, smelling like shampoo and sweat. “It feels good when you do it. _Better_.”

“You want me to fuck you?”

“Please, please— _need it so bad_.” Another nod, this time followed by a whine as Duncan rubs tight circles against Aiden’s prostate, short merciless jabs followed by leisurely strokes.

Duncan kisses the pulse behind his ear, just once, and he reaches over to cup Aiden in his palm, hot and slick in his grasp, so needy. Duncan starts to pump, two, three short strokes in counterpoint to the thrusting of his fingers and Aiden comes shuddering with a whimper, collapsing on his front like a deck of cards.

Duncan lets go of his spent cock, but leaves his fingers inside Aiden for a moment if only to admire the stretch of his hole around their width. When he pulls them out a second later, Aiden wriggles and makes a soft noise of complaint. Then he rolls onto his back and gestures to the erection currently tenting the front of Duncan’s trousers. 

“Are you still going to fuck me with that, daddy?” he asks, with an expression that’s half hopeful and coy, also nervous. 

Duncan probably won’t last two seconds even if he tried—at least not with how long he’s waited to actually fuck this boy stupid, coupled with the fact that Aiden keeps looking at him those eyes. And he’d just called Duncan _daddy_ which under any other circumstance would have made Duncan stare at him blandly and then change the subject, but right now, after everything, his cock gives a sudden traitorous throb. _Fuck._

“Do you think you’ve earned it?” he asks, voice roughened with desire he barely recognises it himself. “Have you been a good boy to deserve _daddy’s cock_?”

Duncan unbuttons his trousers, undoing his fly so he can take himself in hand. He’s a man of the world, he knows that there can be very specific things that people get off to; he just didn’t think this would be one of his. It’s Aiden, and his damn face and his damn mouth. 

“Jesus, you’re big,” Aiden moans, pinkening. He shifts forward onto his knees without being asked and Duncan winds his other hand through Aiden’s hair, baring the boy’s throat to him. He’s the sweetest thing, half-lidded eyes focused on Duncan’s hard cock. 

“Open your mouth,” Duncan says. “I’ll come on your face.”

Aiden obeys like the good boy he is, and Duncan jerks his cock, painting his cheeks and his tongue with his orgasm. 

A spot of come lands on Aiden’s left eyelash. Duncan reaches out to wipe it off with his thumb and then presses the pad of his finger to Aiden’s bottom lip.

Aiden licks it and swallows, never breaking his gaze.

“Next time,” Duncan says. “I’ll fuck you and make you really feel it.”

* * *

Duncan misses his flight. He’ll have to leave in twenty minutes if he plans on ever making it to Amsterdam with enough time to dispose of his mark as scheduled but his limbs feel leaden with the syrupy warmth of orgasm. He doesn’t feel like moving. He taps his cigarette on the ashtray on the bedside table, blowing smoke rings into the ceiling. 

Aiden leans his chin on a fist, looking inordinately pleased with himself. The sheets slide down the taper of his waist and Duncan is briefly distracted by the sight of it before he snaps his attention back to Aiden’s face: grinning the grin of the freshly-fucked. 

It’s interesting how disarming that sight is. 

Duncan’s fucked professionals before, people older than Aiden and with more experience, but he’s never felt like this with any of them: giddy as a schoolboy wanting to go again and again, and he’s done some pretty depraved shit in his time. This is tame in comparison. Forgettable in all the ways except for the fact he had Aiden in his bed and the boy had responded to him so beautifully. 

“So that was…fun,” Aiden prompts. 

Duncan grunts in response. He offers Aiden a cigarette but the boy just wrinkles his nose and waves it away, pillowing his head in his arms. 

“Was it weird, though,” Aiden begins to say then stops himself, mid-sentence, chewing on his lip. “When I called you, uh… you know.”

Duncan waits for him to continue that particular line of thought. He waits for a few seconds longer than anticipated. He checks the clock, and sees he has seventeen minutes left before he has to leave.

“I’m not some sort of… _deviant_ ,” Aiden mumbles. 

Duncan shifts to look at him; they’re on opposite sides of the bed, Aiden naked under the bed sheet, Duncan still with his clothes on, sans shoes, because he’s not an animal. 

“I never said you were a deviant,” Duncan tells him. Then because he can’t help it: “I know you’re a good boy.” He’s aiming for teasing, but then Aiden takes a sharp inhale before darting a sheepish look at him. 

“I am,” Aiden mumbles, the back of his ears flushing. “I can be good.”

Duncan reaches out, giving into the temptation of patting him on the head. 

Aiden endures it for all of five seconds before he ducks away, out of reach. “Are you gonna be gone for a long time?” he asks. 

“Just two weeks.”

Aiden sighs and drapes himself across the covers like a starfish before hooking his foot over Duncan’s ankle. Duncan thinks about unwrapping the sheet from the boy’s body entirely, then undressing himself so he can press against Aiden bared to the skin. He’d be flushed warm underneath him, all smooth muscle and tempting eyes. Tight if Duncan decides to fuck him. So wonderfully tight and wanting.

“Your bed is really comfortable,” Aiden comments, without prompting as usual. “I bet you never get any back pain.”

“You can stay here, if you want,” Duncan offers. 

As soon as the words leave him, he wonders at his own agenda. Then he realises that he doesn’t have one; he just likes the thought of Aiden inhabiting his space, its own kind of intimacy. This boy living, breathing, and walking through the rooms of his apartment even if Duncan has never taken kindly to other people touching his things or intruding into his private life where they might stumble across his secrets. 

“You can water my houseplants for me while I’m gone.”

Aiden laughs. “You don’t have any.”

“I can get some.”

When Aiden sits up, the sheets collect in his lap. “You want me to house-sit for you?” 

Duncan shrugs one shoulder.

“Keep your apartment clean for you, sleep in your bed, wait for you until you get home… _naked_ …” Aiden trails off, waggling his eyebrows. He’s joking, of course, but it still feels like he’s seeing through Duncan, cutting him with that coy look. 

Duncan holds the smoke in his lungs before breathing it out through his nostrils. “You make it sound so grotesque,” he says. 

“You’ll be safe though right?” Aiden asks, in a quieter voice, the rapid shift in subject making Duncan look at him. “You should give me your number. In case I have questions about your…plants.”

Aiden crawls out of bed to fumble through his clothing. A moment later he pulls out his phone from the back pocket of his jeans, a battered Motorola with the blue finish chipped in places. A wolf charm dangles from it, shiny and reflecting the light. 

“It’s from my ex,” Aiden explains, when he catches Duncan staring at it. “I should probably get rid of it but then I might have to take my phone apart. What’s your number?”

“I don’t have a personal number,” Duncan says; he hasn’t had one in years and besides, there’s no one to call him. He doesn’t have any family; most people he knows orbit the same circles. He keeps in touch by showing up at a person’s last known address before following the breadcrumb trail and then accosting them in a dark alley.

“You can give me your number, I can call you instead.” 

“Right. Sure. That sounds reasonable.” Aiden sounds skeptical, but he still gives Duncan his number, the sequence of numbers easy enough to remember. “You’re not going to write it down?” he asks, confused. 

“I’m good at memorisation.” 

“Right,” Aiden says again. “Why did I even ask.”

* * *

Duncan leaves Aiden with the keys to the apartment. 

All the safes are hidden and locked, so there’s little chance of him finding them while Duncan is away. Duncan sets out while Aiden is in the middle of a nap, taking his duffel from where he’s left it on the couch and sliding into his coat. 

The hallway is quiet. Duncan can hear the drone of the hallway light and a person fitting their key into a door several flights below. A second later, Aiden opens the door behind him and steps out in his bare feet. His toes are scrunched up on the floor because it’s cold and there isn’t any carpeting in the hall. He’s wearing the bed sheet like a girl at prom might wear an evening wrap and Duncan knows for a fact he’s still naked underneath it.

“You left your gloves,” Aiden says, sounding out of breath.

Duncan accepts them, clenching them in a fist before pocketing them. “Thank you.” 

“So: good luck!” Aiden says, making a vague gesture with one hand. “With… _whatever_.”

Duncan nods. “Be good now.”

“I’ll try my best,” Aiden grins. Then he leans forward and presses a kiss to Duncan’s jaw, fleeting, but Duncan tilts his head to meet it halfway and wraps his fingers in his hair. 

Aiden’s lips brush his moustache. His smile grows wider and he keeps his hands curled around Duncan’s shoulders, as he stands on the tips of his toes though he’s not that much shorter. 

“I promise not to get into too much trouble, if you won’t.”

“I’ll try,” Duncan says, clutching his waist under the bed sheet. “But I can’t make any promises.”

* * *

Kuala Lumpur is humid. Traffic is perpetually at a standstill but the food more than makes up for it.

The first thing Duncan does after checking into his hotel is head downtown to buy a spare cell phone. He saves Aiden’s number as his only contact but doesn’t call him until two days later when he’s sitting in a cramped restaurant with grease covering everything from the walls to the menu. It takes him several minutes of staring at his phone to figure out the country code, and then he’s dialing Aiden’s phone number from memory. Two rings, four, six, ten, and it could be largely the heat but his spine is sweating and so are his palms. He’s not used to such abrupt change in weather; it’s why he’s rarely at his Florida address. He prefers the cold.

“Hello?” Aiden’s voice sounds sleepy, like Duncan had just woken him. “Duncan? Where are you?”

“I’d tell you,” Duncan says, a flicker of a smile warping the seriousness of his expression. “But then I’d have to kill you.”

Duncan doesn’t have to see it to know that Aiden’s smiling. There’s a jittery intake of breath, a pause before he’s laughing. 

“I got you a Peace lily,” Aiden says, and there’s the sound of him shuffling around. He interrupts himself mid-sentence with a yawn that’s so infectious Duncan has to stop himself echoing him in return. “Also, there’s this weird stain on your ceiling; you should probably get your landlord to look at that.”

“Are you at the apartment?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Aiden says, with a long enough pause that Duncan can tell he’s fibbing. “And before you ask, yes I’m also naked. Very naked. Not a stich on. _At all._ ”

Duncan’s food arrives: flat bread with dhal and curry. He’s not usually so brazen with his food choices because the last thing he needs while on unfamiliar terrain is a bout of explosive diarrhea, but this is his first time working a job in this city and the street vendor who had sold him the cell phone had pointed him to the restaurant when he had asked where he can grab something quick to eat. 

Duncan thanks the waiter and asks if they also serve beer. At nine in the morning, they do not, but he thanks the man anyway.

“Okay, I lied. I’ve got clothes on,” Aiden amends, as Duncan tears the bread into strips. “But I’ll drop by the apartment tomorrow to water your Peace lily.”

“Naked?” Duncan ventures a guess.

“Maybe not,” Aiden says, laughing again though his tone is sheepish. “I put the Peace lily by the window and I don’t want to scandalise the whole neighbourhood.”

But Duncan can imagine it perfectly: the sun slanting through the window, turning all that unblemished skin gold. Aiden doesn’t have any scars like him except for the one on his right knee where he said he’d skinned it as a kid trying to ride his bike without training wheels. Meanwhile Duncan has scars all over, like lines on a map reminding him of every bad choice he’s ever made. 

“Is this your personal number?” Aiden asks.

“For now,” Duncan says. He dips his bread into the curry.

“I’ll save it then.” Then Aiden adds, “For now.”

Duncan nods, before remembering Aiden can’t actually see him. He’s not sure what to say next, outside of waiting for Aiden’s cues and responding to them with gentle ribbing. He keeps most of his phone conversations short as he prefers face to face interactions, so many nuances lost in expression and body language, though he’s always been able to glean intention from inflection and tone. Still, he stays on the line, waiting for whatever the boy has to say next. In the meantime, he listens to the rustle of movement, every hum and sigh and yawn.

“This is gonna sound weird but are you by any chance missing any socks?”

“What?” 

“I found three behind the washing machine. I didn’t know you were the kind of person to wear ankle socks, by the way. Do you own anything that isn’t black?”

“I wear grey on occasion,” Duncan says, his tone light. “When the mood strikes, I wear dark blue.”

“You think you’re being funny,” Aiden says.

“Are you amused?”

Aiden makes a thoughtful noise. “Maybe. I haven’t decided yet.”

Duncan knows for a fact Aiden is smiling; he can hear it in Aiden’s voice. “So you’re not going to tell me where you are right now? I can’t even guess?”

“I’m not in Bucharest.”

“I gathered as much. Otherwise you wouldn’t be calling me at two in the morning.”

“You must be tired. I’ll leave you be then.”

“But you’ll call again, right?” Aiden asks. “And I can call you? Send you messages?”

“Of course you can.”

“Great! I’d like that a lot.”

“Me too,” Duncan says, surprising himself by how much he means it.

He ends the call when the boy starts breaking into yawns with more frequency than the waiter keeps returning to refill his glass with water. Time difference is hell because his body is still operating on a different timezone altogether and he’s starting to feel the side effects of old age compounded with lack of sleep.

Duncan walks all the way back to his hotel to stretch his legs and ward off lethargy, passing through a noisy street market selling fruit and all kinds of baubles. He stops midway into lighting a cigarette, in front of a stall fringed with glass beads and barely held together with pieces of mismatched tarp and plywood. 

The vendor is a woman wearing a pink hijab and studded jeans. She looks up from reading a magazine when Duncan’s shadow looms over. “Phone charms?” she asks in English, raising a perfect eyebrow. 

* * *

Duncan’s phone rings just as he finishes tying the last knots in his mark’s restraints.

He glances down at Krishnasamy where he’s whimpering on the ground and squirming in misery with his own tie stuffed inside his mouth and one eyelid swollen shut where Duncan had levelled a punch at him. The man is a former secretary-general of the People’s Justice Party and someone somewhere is willing to pay good money to ensure he keeps his mouth shut. He’s one of the three people in Duncan’s kill list, the one easiest to track down.

Duncan’s phone continues to ring, echoing shrilly within the four corners of the basement. 

It’s such an alien sound that at first he doesn’t realise it’s coming from him, more specifically his back pocket.

Krishnasamy blinks and Duncan blinks back calmly in response. He holds up a finger to indicate silence but the man only squirms harder, trying to crawl away like the worm that he is as if Duncan’s shift of attention might provide him with an opportunity to escape. 

Duncan dashes those hopes rather quickly by digging the heel of his boot into Krishnasamy’s spine, hard enough to edge into pain but not to actually cripple him for life. Not yet, anyway. He needs him alive because he needs information. After that, it’s fair game. 

“Duncan?”

Duncan doesn’t sigh. He would, if he were a lesser man. A lesser man would have also had the decency to at least feign embarrassment that his phone had gone off while he was torturing another man for information, and Duncan may wear many hats in his life, but he is not that man. He does the math; it should be around three in the morning in Romania which means Aiden is probably in bed. Just not asleep. 

He should hang up the phone but at the telltale giggle, what comes out instead is: “Have you been drinking?” 

“I’m also naked,” Aiden slurs, and Duncan tries to conjure the picture in his head, despite his better judgment. All that unmarred skin, and the trail of dark hair trickling a shadowy path below Aiden’s belly button. He’s surprisingly lithe for someone who spends most of his days idling about in cafés and drawing portraits in public parks, also a lot stronger than he looks. 

“ _Aiden_ ,” Duncan says. He could turn his back on Krishnasamy to give their conversation the privacy it’s due but he’s worked enough jobs to know that would be a supremely bad idea. Three may be a crowd even in a basement where the only light source is a bare yellow bulb swinging haphazardly from a cord, but you should never turn your back on the enemy even after you’ve put a bullet in them, or three.

“I hate it sometimes,” Aiden continues, ignoring the warning in Duncan’s voice. “When you say my name like that. Makes me feel like I did something bad.”

“You should be asleep,” Duncan reminds him, taking a chair from the corner of the room and hunkering down in front Krishnasamy so he can keep an eye on him. 

“Geez, _dad,”_ Aiden snorts. “It’s only—” There’s a thump in the background as he fumbles for something. “Oops, it’s almost three in the morning.”

“Then sleep.”

Aiden, of course, will not and just keeps barrelling on. There’s a languid, almost hypnotic quality to his voice, a cadence that soothes Duncan’s remaining irritation at having to chase Krishnasamy on foot for a whole ten minutes. He doesn’t know why people still do that, even when they know it’s futile. 

“Guess where I am right now.” 

Duncan has an inkling. He slips on a pair of brass knuckles, more for show than anything else, and raises his eyebrows meaningfully at Krishnasamy. Krishnasamy stops moving, the bob of his throat visible above his collar. 

“I’m in your bed. God, your mattress is really…I’m lying on my stomach.” Duncan can hear the minute rustle of sheets. “I’m hard,” Aiden mumbles, shy, speaking so fast Duncan has to take a moment to make sure he hasn’t misheard him.

“You’re hard,” he says, in as flat a tone as he can manage.

“Yeah,” Aiden breathes. “Yes.” 

This is the worst time to be having this exchange but Duncan’s been in some bizarre situations before, though few of them involved phone sex. Still: he’s great at compartmentalising. One of the skills listed in his file and underlined several times is his ability to multi-task even under duress.

Aiden’s probably rubbing himself all over Duncan’s sheets because his breath has picked up and everything sounds muffled from his end. Duncan wonders what it must be like to be in the same room as him, watching as he pleasured himself and leaked precome all over the sheets, thighs flexing, ass bared.

_“Stop.”_

Krishnasamy flinches, catching Duncan’s gaze. “No, not you,” Duncan tells him, frowning. To Aiden, he says, “Stop what you’re doing right now.”

There’s an abrupt pause as Aiden’s breath stutters. “What?” he says, and clears his throat, sounding embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—I just thought—”

“Be a good boy for me,” Duncan says. 

Krishnasamy regards Duncan with a mildly horrified gaze. Duncan flexes his fingers around the brass knuckles and the dull finish glints under the flickering basement lighting. He tests the cool weight of them in his hand. Though these days he much prefers the straightforward efficiency of a gun, there’s just something so satisfying about using your bare hands.

“Okay,” says Aiden in a quieter voice, tone nervous though he keeps giggling. “Okay,” he repeats. “I can be good for you. _Daddy.”_

Duncan catches himself smiling. It feels odd, given the situation, and odder still that he’s letting Aiden distract him in the middle of a job. He’s never been anyone’s daddy before. He knows what it means, generally; he may not use e-mail but he doesn’t live under a rock. He likes the thought of it, of being the one to tend to Aiden’s needs, Aiden deferring to him on matters that concern his own pleasure, though nothing as fanciful as letting Duncan dictate every aspect of his life such as when he sleeps or eats. 

“I brought one of my toys over,” Aiden says.

“Which one?” Duncan asks, and his voice is extremely level and not heightened with sudden interest at all. 

“It’s the big one. Because I missed you.”

The offhand confession makes Duncan pause, boot heel kneading just above Krishnasamy’s kneecap and about to grind down. He wonders if he’s ever missed anyone before, but that would mean he can stand being around a person for the amount of time it takes to miss them when they’re gone. When he got his appendix removed and had to be put on a liquid diet, he had missed red meat. When he was in rural Montana for close to a year, tending to the mistakes of his younger peers who had done a slapdash job of things, he had missed the city something fierce. 

Duncan’s only been gone seven days. Aiden claims to miss him; he even bought Duncan a Peace lily. The thought is absurd, strange, disconcerting all at once. 

“I’m putting it in Daddy,” Aiden says, like he’s sharing a particularly lurid secret, his voice pitched low enough to make the skin of Duncan’s neck prickle and tear him away from his musings. 

“Hang on—let me just—ah, _fuuuuh_ \- _fuck._ There it is, there it is. _Oh god._ ”

Aiden starts panting harshly, whimpering as Duncan imagines him pushing the toy in—slick, stretching him wide, his rim a lovely flush of pink. Duncan had fingered Aiden into a frenzy the night he left for his flight and knows just how much the boy can take, how much his greedy hole needs to be filled. It’s really a wonder no one’s snatched him up yet and kept him. Well, another man’s loss is another’s gain.

“Is it all the way inside yet?”

Aiden whines in reply. Duncan inhales sharply at the sound, picturing him in his bed, the boy’s knees parted invitingly, his toes clenched on the sheets. Duncan’s seen the boy’s fat little cock. He imagines it dripping with need between Aiden’s trembling thighs. Then those thighs shining with smears of lube. His hair on Duncan’s pillows, leaving its sweet scent on the cotton. 

“It’s not in yet—just _ah, shi—just a little bit more._ ” Then Aiden laughs and says, in his normal cadence,” I wish it was you. Wish you were here instead. Fucking me.”

That, Duncan thinks, is the real tragedy of things. He should have fucked Aiden when he had the chance, a quick and violent mess in his living room, with Aiden bent over the couch, or maybe pressed against the shelf so he’d have something to hold onto while Duncan pummelled his ass seven ways to Sunday. 

But Duncan knows that if he had fucked him, that would only be the beginning. Duncan will never want to stop. He’ll want to do it again, make him beg for it and want it just as much as he does. He’ll follow Aiden to every dark alley, he’ll trail him to work. He’ll fuck him in empty staircases in the _Palatul Cotroceni_ where the walls are not soundproofed and anyone can walk in on them.

Because Duncan knows himself. If he’d fucked Aiden before the job, there will be no job, and he wouldn’t be here right now in the basement of an abandoned building on Campbell Road, intimidating unsavoury characters for information. 

“You’d like that?” Duncan ought to congratulate himself for keeping his face largely impassive. “You’d like me to sink my cock into you, nice and slow, make you feel every inch of it?”

Aiden gasps, already lost in the fantasy. “It’s big. _You’re big._ ”

“Too big for you, kitten?”

“No, just perfect,” Aiden sighs languidly. “I like that it’s big. It’s nice. Makes me feel real good.”

“Please stop talking. It’s only giving me an erection,” Krishnasamy says, apparently managing to spit out his makeshift gag while Duncan wasn’t looking.

Duncan eyes him warily.

“When I get back, I am going fuck you,” Duncan says into the phone, every word precise and measured as he purposely avoids Krishnasamy’s gaze. “I’ll be gentle at first, stretch you out with my cock, rub that sweet little spot inside you again and again so you leak all over yourself and start to squirm.”

_“Fuck.”_

“Language,” Duncan chides. 

Aiden takes a deep shaky breath. “I’ll be good. I’ll be a good boy. Sorry, I—”

“Or maybe I’ll make you work for it,” Duncan interrupts him, “I should put you on my lap and make you sit on my cock. Hands behind your back as you ride me, and you won’t be slow about it either because you’re a needy little thing, aren’t you, boy? Always aching to have that itch inside you scratched, that empty little hole filled.”

Krishnasamy has that disbelieving look on his face again but it doesn’t matter because the man will be dead soon enough, buried under a pile of rubble, and there’s a boy across an ocean with the brightest eyes whose hunger matches Duncan’s own.

Aiden is panting harshly into his ear, the static doing little to mask his desperation. “I’m going to come,” he whines, “But I don’t want to yet—I want you to—I—” He can’t finish a sentence; he must be so keyed up, on the edge of an orgasm and dangling by the skin of his teeth. 

Duncan is impressed he hasn’t already come. His ear is warm where his phone is pressed to it. He can feel sweat beading down his hairline though that could be attributed to the packed heat of the basement.

“I just used a bit of lube, you know, so it’d hurt a little going in,” Aiden says, and Duncan has to marvel over how he’s still coherent. “But it’s— _it’s in now_. All seven inches of it. I feel so full.”

“I’m bigger than that, sweetheart. Just seven inches?” Duncan smiles, examining the row of brass knuckles ribbing the back of his hand.

Aiden bites down on a groan. “ _Oh my god_. _What_.” 

Duncan has to strain his ears to hear it but he can just make out the slick sounds of Aiden fucking himself vigorously with the toy. “Fuck, yeah. It’ll be so much better when you’re here, daddy. You’d give it to me so deep, I’d feel it for weeks. Gonna be so full of your come when you’re done with me. Gonna be so sore.”

He’s getting bold.

“You’re sweet,” Duncan says, without thinking. He doesn’t know why he says it. It just spills out: a statement of fact. He does find Aiden sweet. Not in the way sugar is sweet because too much of it can be cloying and it’s easy to get sick of it after a while, but in the way a baby bird is sweet as it tries to fend for itself in the wild. There’s an earnestness about Aiden that’s endearing. And his eagerness is charming as all else. 

Aiden is just as startled into silence as Duncan is and for a while all Duncan hears is his syncopated breaths. “I miss you,” Aiden says all of a sudden. “I know it’s probably weird to say it, but I really do.”

A muffled noise distracts Duncan from responding. Krishnasamy has started to crawl towards the door, taking advantage of his momentary distraction. 

“I’ll call you back,” Duncan says to Aiden with every intention of keeping his promise. He flips his phone shut before pocketing it, then strides over to where Krishnasamy is attempting to slither up to freedom with his hands and feet bound and there being two flights of stairs before him.

Duncan grabs him by the back of the hair, hauling him back to the middle of the room, clicking his tongue at all that kicking and screaming. 

“Sorry about the interruption,” he says, crouching down to his eye-level and popping a crick in his neck. He clenches his right hand into a fist; the brass knuckles gleam briefly. “Where were we again?”

  
  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s not happy, not exactly, standing in Duncan’s empty apartment not really doing anything. But he feels something akin to it when he thinks about Duncan coming back. 

Aiden is a pro at embarrassing himself. 

It’s one of his many talents. Aside from drawing and his sometimes lack of tact, he possesses the uncanny ability to open his mouth and just say the stupidest shit. Vivian used to look at him like he was something that crawled out of a bog when he did it, because she couldn’t believe anyone would be so lacking in self awareness that it bordered on parody. Aiden wasn’t always like this. He’s sure that at some point in his life he was a quiet kid who mostly kept to himself and had a semblance of social graces. 

But it’s like picking up a bad habit, or mishearing the words, it happens enough times and it’s entrenched in your subconscious: harder and harder to shake off that after a while you stop questioning it. 

Aiden opens his mouth around Duncan and words just come out, apparently. 

This would’ve been fine if these were your everyday run-of-the-mill words, words born of heightened moments like surprise or fear or arousal and never repeated again in polite company. But Aiden had called Duncan _daddy._ Once would have been forgivable, twice could be a slip of the tongue, but three times on three separate occasions point to an underlying problem that needs to be addressed.

And Aiden’s had counselling before he dropped out of high school; he knows he doesn’t have any daddy issues. He’ll put his foot down on it. His dad was a bastard, a drunk and a cheat, a man prone to violent whims.

Duncan is the complete opposite though Aiden knows he’s equally if not more capable of even greater violence. He kills people for a living; Aiden isn’t stupid. But he’s kind to Aiden, sweet, and isn’t that what matters in the end?

Now Aiden is pining after him like some lovelorn maiden in the age of knights while Duncan is elsewhere no doubt engaged in activities of a suspect nature. 

He hasn’t called Aiden back since that night which gives Aiden plenty of opportunity to drive himself crazy with worry. He’s bouncing off the walls overthinking, going through their text messages, rereading them like a cipher trying to crack a hidden code.

Duncan texts like he speaks: in short, clipped sentences, to the point. Aiden texts like he’s a ten year old who’s had too much Mountain Dew in one sitting and doesn’t know what a punctuation mark is. 

At five pm on the sixth day, Aiden gives in and texts Duncan just as he’s packing up his things at Izvor Park. 

_dadd_

_Daddy?_

Jesus, he thinks. _What am I doing with my life?_

_Go to bed, Aiden._

It’s not even evening yet— which means Duncan must be somewhere with a different timezone— but Aiden doesn’t say that because he doesn’t want to ruin this, whatever this is. Instead he texts, _yes, daddy_ and Duncan replies: _good boy,_ and Aiden breathes in shakily and decides well, that’s enough fooling around for the day; he’s reached his quota. He slips his phone in his back pocket and walks home. 

By the time he makes it to his apartment, night has already settled in and his stomach is pinching up in protest. He makes scrambled eggs and toasts a slice of leftover bread before parking himself at his desk to draw. 

Then he stares at his phone for at least five minutes. On the sixth minute, he picks it up.

_Daddy._

_I thought I told you to go to bed?_

_Duncan,_ Aiden texts, a last ditch-attempt at normalcy, _jsyk I accidentally set fire to ur apartment._

_JYSK?_

_Just so you know._

Aiden sends another text when there’s no reply forthcoming. _I’m also just kidding. Also u promised to call?_

 _Busy,_ Duncan says, curt as always, and Aiden tries not to imagine what he’s doing or ask any followup questions.

 _Sorry,_ Aiden says, before he can think about how pathetic that makes him sound. He finishes his eggs, resolutely doesn’t jerk off in the shower, and then manages to tackle the dishes for the first time this week.

Forty minutes later and there’s a reply from Duncan while he’s putting away the plates:

_I’m not mad._

_OK_

_Be a good boy for daddy and do as I say._

_OK_

_Just OK?_

Aiden’s heart races, just a little. 

_Yes, daddy._

He hits send.

_Go to bed._

_With my clothes on?_

Aiden’s just teasing. Or at least part of him is. It’s hard to own up to this because while it’s brand new and thrilling, it’s also fucking embarrassing. Also, there are limits to this particular fantasy on account of the weather having turned and the heating in his apartment being shit; there’s no way he’ll survive the night sleeping without at least three layers of blankets cocooning him. 

It’s a pleasant thought in theory however: him in bed, with the sheets brushing his hard cock and sensitive nipples. His phone buzzes. He flips it open.

_Keep your clothes on. Good boys don’t sleep naked._

Right, Aiden thinks, embarrassed. Of course they don’t. He rolls his eyes, half at himself and half at the absurdity of the situation. There should be books on this; maybe he can hit the library on the weekend to do some research so he doesn’t feel like he’s navigating a landmine drunk and with a blindfold on. 

_I can be good,_ he says to Duncan.

_I know._

Aiden reads the last message twice, the certainty in the words sitting heavy and warm in his stomach. _I know._

He can be good. He knows he can. For Duncan if no one else. 

Aiden sets his phone back on the nightstand and rolls onto his stomach. His dick is half-hard already; it won’t take much to get him off, just a bit of friction and theatrical fantasy but he keeps his hips completely still and his erection pressed snugly against the mattress as if this act of defiance and discipline will somehow be commendable. Then he picks up his phone again, fingers hovering over the keys.

 _Good night daddy,_ he says.

_Good night Aiden._

It’s strange, this whole thing. Nothing has changed, but then everything has.

* * *

And then there’s Duncan’s apartment, its own kind of mystery with its hidden compartments and loose floorboards storing a number of different things Aiden should probably not know about. 

There’s a safe tucked away in the closet; the kitchen drawers are full of new cutlery and also the sharpest knives. There’s only one set of bedsheets. 

When Aiden gets come on them by accident—calling Duncan up in the middle of night after a generous sampling of his liquor stash was probably not his most inspired idea—he runs the spot under cold water before stuffing the rest of it into the washing machine with the most fruity-smelling of laundry detergents. 

Aiden is usually able to mind his own business, usually being the operative word, but sometimes when he’s bored curiosity gets the best of him. 

So he ventures into Duncan’s closet. 

He doesn’t steal anything. He just stands there running his fingers over the neatly folded shirts and the sweaters hanging in gradients of black and grey. Duncan only has three pairs of shoes: two of them look alike, one of them has been worn to the point of falling apart, and all of them are black. Heavy-duty leather, the fit custom-made. 

He has white undershirts, which is almost shocking because Aiden has never seen him wear any other colour but black. Then again Aiden’s never seen him in just his undershirt either, so there’s that. 

Aiden tries to imagine Duncan filling up the empty spaces of every room. 

There’s nothing ornamental in the apartment, no art except the one Aiden had gifted him which he has propped against the bedroom window, next to a leather wristwatch with dead batteries. He’d left a carton of cigarettes in the drawer of the bedside table which means he must smoke often, though Aiden knows this about him because of the cling of menthol cigarettes on all his clothes. Aiden lights a fresh cigarette and admires the look of it in his hand but stubs it in a nearby ashtray before he can leave a mess. 

Then he lies down in Duncan’s bed. 

The mattress is springy, leagues more expensive than the one Aiden owns. It’s why Aiden keeps coming back to his apartment; apart from keeping an eye on his Peace lily, he likes sleeping in a bed that doesn’t sag in the middle and punches him in the spine every time he moves.

He wonders how much it cost Duncan, and the kind of money a man like him must make. 

Duncan can probably afford better furnishings but instead he chooses to live here, in a middle-class neighbourhood full of families with kids and people working boring 9 to 5 jobs. A wolf expertly hidden in the herd. 

Aiden gets up from the bed and peers out the window. There are kids outside throwing a soccer ball around, laughing and yelling. He smiles, watching them. He’s not happy, not exactly, standing in Duncan’s empty apartment not really doing anything. But he feels something akin to it when he thinks about Duncan coming back. 

* * *

“I’m going crazy,” Aiden says to Oskar when they meet for coffee and Oskar talks to him about a part-time job, one that Aiden has to decline because it involves him wearing the costume of another anthropomorphic character.

“Poverty makes you crazy,” Oskar agrees.

Aiden doesn’t doubt that but this isn’t one of those days. He just paid the rent; he has food in the fridge. There’s some money put away—practically extorted from Duncan, after he’d agreed for Aiden to draw him—so it’ll be awhile before he needs to figure out another money making scheme. 

Against his better judgment and because he’s practically bursting at the seams from all things unsaid, Aiden tells Oskar about Duncan. Glossing over everything makes him sound like he’s just seeing some guy he keeps bumping into at random, and not a professional contract killer almost twice his age whom he refers to as _daddy_ on occasion. 

“Didn’t think you went for guys,” Oskar huffs. “Though now that I think about it…” He gives Aiden a once over.

“That’s your main takeaway here?”

“How old is he?”

Aiden realises he doesn’t know. He may know what brand deodorant Duncan uses after taking a peek into his medicine cabinet, but he doesn’t know shit about him, not the shit that counts. Duncan’s perfected evading his questions to a near artform without Aiden realising he’s been skirted around as well as misdirected until it’s too late. But then who’s he to demand answers anyway? He’s just some kid Duncan’s fucking.

“Is how old he is _that_ important? Age is just a number right?” 

“I guess.” Oskar hums, stroking the beard he’s just started to cultivate in an effort to look more metropolitan. “It could be worse: you could be into… _horses_ and then where would that leave you.”

Aiden throws him a flinty look over his cappuccino. “I forget why I bother with you sometimes.”

“You don’t bother with me, Aiden. _I’m your only friend in Bucharest!_ ” Oskar nudges him with his shoe under the table. He grins when Aiden nudges him back with more force behind it.

“You really need to get out more, though. You keep working, hanging around strange characters like this guy. What’s his name? Daniel? Something with a D.”

“It’s Daddy,” Aiden says. “And he’s not strange.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Did you just say—”

“Duncan,” Aiden interrupts quickly. Then he thinks: _fuck, fucking fuck._

Oskar hums thoughtfully, seemingly oblivious to the slip. Aiden hides behind the menu, even though he’s already ordered an egg and cheese croissant and decimated about half of it. His heart is racing a mile a minute; he thinks he’s about to pop a blood vessel in his eye. _Fuck_. 

“I’m happy for you. As happy as one can be for a friend’s sudden stroke of fortune.”

Aiden peers over the menu. “What does that mean?”

“Well you weren’t exactly very lucky with Vivian, were you? That was a whole tin of worms wasn’t it?”

“The expression is ‘can of worms’. Not _tin of worms_.”

Oskar shrugs. “Americans get so fussy with their turns of phrase.” He waves a hand in Aiden’s direction. 

“You seem content, at least,” he says after a pause. “Let us just hope this man isn’t harboring any dark secrets.”

“He’s not strange and he doesn’t have any dark secrets!” Aiden snaps a little too defensively. Then he lapses into silence when he realises he has a type. First Vivian, then Duncan; he sure knows how to pick them. 

“I don’t even know if he likes me,” he says. 

He suspects Duncan likes him mainly for his body and his youth though he doesn’t strike Aiden as someone so shallow. Aiden isn’t _exactly_ scintillating company but at least he has his looks, which is often half the draw. The other half is his persistence, the fact that he’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. The downside is that he can be pushy about it. Bossy. A little bit of a brat. Difficult. In the long run, that can wear a person down. It had driven Vivian away in the end more than it charmed her. No one has the patience to deal with his sullen moods. 

“He trusted you with the keys to his apartment,” Oskar says, in his best attempt to comfort him. “I have known you half a year and even I wouldn’t do something so stupid.” 

Aiden finds that weirdly comforting.

“So either he must like you very much or he’s just a terrible judge of character.”

“Hey,” Aiden lobs a piece of bread at him. “I’m trustworthy!” 

When Oskar simply looks at him mildly, he squawks, _“I can be!_ ”

“But you are never careful,” Oskar reminds him. “I would not want you touching my things. I know for a fact you are going to break them.”

“You don’t have anything worth breaking anyway,” Aiden says. 

“Only my heart,” Oskar laughs, winking. “Which is most valuable.” 

* * *

It’s been more than two weeks. 

Aiden’s vacuumed only three times since Duncan has left, though he keeps coming back to take baths in the tub and use the washer/dryer. 

There’s just something so depressing about an empty apartment. The second day he’d been gone, Aiden spent a night in Duncan’s bed and woken up sweating from nightmares. Not even the usual bad stuff about his childhood, but grim glimpses of things that have never happened to him. Dreams about Duncan: Duncan dying, Duncan as a kid, Duncan bleeding beautifully on snow-covered ground. He’d woken up with the oddest sensation in his chest, like someone had stepped on it, homesick for something he couldn’t name. 

Duncan forgot to close the blinds when he left so sun comes streaming in the windows. Aiden squats down next to the Peace lily, who lives on the floor in the corner. 

“Hey,” he whispers. The Peace lily doesn’t answer, but he pours a glass of water on it anyway, watching the droplets roll off the waxy skin.

Aiden decides another peek into Duncan’s liquor cabinet is in order. Just to make sure nothing is out of place and the alcohol is behaving itself as it should be. No other reason. 

Because he has the rest of the day free, he decides to get some drawing done, and if he has a few sips of the good stuff then no one is around to berate him for it. 

It’s late afternoon when he comes to, groggy after passing out on the kitchen table surrounded by half-finished sketches of the new story he’s working on, something about assassins. The sun has dipped outside, the temperature dropping further. His neck aches from having fallen asleep at a weird angle. Aiden’s drawings stare back at him, unfinished in a half-circle; a character with a suspicious resemblance to Duncan is wearing an eyepatch with a design that’s undergone several changes. 

Aiden rubs the pad of his thumb over the linework to soften any sharp edges. Then he sets out for the store to buy ingredients for a simple dinner because Duncan’s fridge is unfortunately lacking anything of real sustenance. Everything else that has passed its expiry date, Aiden had tossed away and now all that’s left is an unlabeled jar of pickles. Or at least the contents resemble pickles anyway. Aiden would rather not find out. 

The first thing he does when he comes back to the apartment is turn the heating on. Duncan has heated floors, because he lives in a modern apartment and not a shoebox-sized closet like Aiden does which comes with its own infestation of cockroaches and holes in the ceiling.

Aiden warms his hands under his armpits as he waits for the rest of his body to catch up. Dinner is just some rigatoni with a pre-made sauce from a bottle. He pours himself some gin, flips through the channels on Duncan’s TV—nothing is in English, Duncan doesn’t have cable—and falls asleep wearing one of Duncan’s bathrobes over a t-shirt and some boxers. He snorts awake in the middle of a dream, panicking before he comes to grips with himself. 

A black and white movie is playing on TV, something familiar he can almost identify because it’s got Humphrey Bogart in it. Aiden rubs the sleep from his eyes. He should probably go home. He’d joked about house-sitting for Duncan but it’s boring without him here. Even his smell has started to fade from the closet; he’s been gone longer than he said he would. 

Judging by the light outside, it’s late enough that the trains might have stopped running already. Aiden collects his half-empty bowl of dinner from the coffee table and that’s when he hears it: a noise at the door, the creak of footsteps. His heart stops. He thinks of his father, before reminding himself he’s twenty-six years old and the old man can’t hurt him, not anymore; he’s made sure of that. 

Aiden glances around: he has nothing to defend himself with against an intruder. There’s a lamp that looks sturdy enough, an ashtray shaped like a pair of lungs, and two car magazines in German on the coffee table. He has his fists; Aiden can hold his own in a fight and he took self-defense classes after emancipating himself, but what if the intruder has a knife or a bat or some complicated contraption that is a combination of both? He chooses the lamp; it feels solid in his hands. He toes his slippers off—these are Duncan’s as well—and pads quietly into the hall with slow, careful steps.

The only sound in the apartment is the white noise of the TV in the background: Humphrey Bogart romancing Audrey Hepburn and telling her never to resist terrible impulses. 

For a second, Aiden thinks he may have only imagined hearing it—maybe he’s still half asleep, maybe he’s dreaming—when there’s another creak, this time closer to him than he’s comfortable with. He raises the lamp, ready to fling it at the oncoming threat, until he rounds the corner and sees Duncan untying his shoes by the door. He flings the lamp anyway out of shock. 

Duncan catches it with alarmingly fast reflexes.

“Aiden,” he says, sounding astonished, cradling the lamp like a football against his chest.

Aiden slumps against the wall in relief. “Nice catch,” he says, feigning calm.

“Great throw.” Duncan sets the lamp aside, putting it on the table in the foyer where he’d set down his duffel bag. He looks exhausted, bags under his eyes from lack of sleep; his hair sticking up in the back. Aiden watches him step out of his shoes, and of course even his socks are black too.

“What are you doing here?”

Aiden makes a vague gesture with his hands before dropping them swinging at his sides. “Peace lily.”

“Is that my robe?”

Aiden fastens the ties self-consciously. “I didn’t know you were coming back tonight,” he says, deflecting. He crosses his arms. 

Duncan still hasn’t moved, but neither has he blinked. “I didn’t either.” 

“Well, are you hungry?” Aiden wonders what the etiquette is when your not-boyfriend returns from his illegal job and you mistake him for an intruder in his own home. “I have some leftover pasta.”

He flees to the kitchen without waiting for a response. 

There’s a pause before Duncan follows. 

Aiden hears him hanging up his coat and then sigh. 

Aiden heats up the pasta in the microwave, watching the plate rotate through the glass. When he turns, he finds Duncan poking around in the freezer for a beer. Duncan emerges triumphant, popping the cap off the bottle by tapping it twice against the edge of the counter. He tosses the cap in the sink where it makes a loud pinging noise like the sound of a coin falling. His audible groan of contentment bowls over Aiden like a wave. 

Then he catches Duncan’s unblinking gaze in the window: it’s how Aiden knows Duncan’s standing right behind him, watching him silently. He hadn’t even heard him this time. 

The microwave stops buzzing. 

Duncan steps closer, then slips a hand through the fold of the robe so he can stroke his palm across Aiden’s stomach. 

Aiden doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, his gaze locked onto Duncan’s in the window, waiting. He can hear his own heart beating; he can hear his own breath, like the roar of a tide in his eardrums. His skin feels tight with anticipation, and he wonders if Duncan can feel it too: the sharpness in the air like the calm before a storm. 

“Have you been a good boy?” Duncan asks, his lips hovering right next to Aiden’s ear, close enough to touch if Aiden so much as tilts his head just a fraction. So they’re doing that; Duncan hasn’t forgotten. Well, neither has Aiden, and he swallows down his trepidation and fear and a jumble of other emotions making his hands shake and just lets his ID take over. He moans at the cool rasp of Duncan’s stubble against his cheek. Duncan hasn’t even kissed him yet and suddenly that’s all Aiden can think about: his mouth, anywhere on his body.

“I’ve been good.” Aiden’s breath quivers as Duncan’s other hand closes over his throat—not tight exactly but Aiden tenses until Duncan starts nuzzling his temple and shushing him like a frightened colt. “I’ve been really _really good.”_

“Well, you smell like gin.” Something like fond amusement colours Duncan’s tone. “Have you been breaking into my liquor cabinet, Aiden?”

“Well, maybe just a little bit naughty, then,” Aiden laughs. Duncan chuckles too, and the sound warms Aiden down to his tailbone, making him sigh.

“I want to fuck you,” Duncan says abruptly, the sudden shift in mood giving Aiden whiplash. That’s when Duncan presses their bodies together meaningfully, his hips just shy of grinding down. His hand is hot where it presses against Aiden’s lower stomach; his fingernails scratch the sparse hair running just below Aiden’s belly button. “Haven’t thought about anything else since I left. My darling boy, needing his poor little hole filled.”

“Fuck me, then,” Aiden says. He clenches his teeth and has to fight off a whole body shiver. _Jesus_. “Fuck me daddy. Come on, I want it.” 

“You think you deserve it?” Duncan strokes his fingers over Aiden’s throat, thumb resting against his Adam’s apple, firm touches but not bearing down with strength. “You think you deserve to come on my cock?”

Aiden isn’t sure what the appropriate response should be because at some point his brain has stopped working. His cock is so hard in his boxers, leaking already, and it’s taking all his willpower not to rub his ass shamelessly against Duncan’s erection. Because yes he’s been naughty, drinking all that gin, making himself at home in Duncan’s apartment, but he’s also been wanting this so badly since they met: Duncan fucking him, using him however he likes. Aiden will give him everything even if that means he’ll be wholly consumed and there’ll be nothing left in the aftermath. 

“Take the robe off.” Duncan steps away, his hands leaving Aiden’s body. It takes a second for the command to sink in, for Aiden to register the disappearance of his warmth, and by then Aiden jerks into motion with quick, clumsy movements. “Underwear too.” 

Aiden doesn’t even hesitate. He shuffles out of his boxers, stepping out of them and kicking them to the side. He shivers when cool air glances over the bare skin of his ass. Duncan reaches for him but only to yank the robe of his shoulders to let it puddle on the floor. 

Aiden is about to twist out of his shirt next but Duncan stops him with a hand on the small of his back.

“Bend over. Hands flat on the table.”

Aiden glances at him over his shoulder. There’s a shadow in Duncan’s eyes, heavy and dangerous; it makes him look like a stranger. Then their eyes meet and he looks like himself again, the same man who’d made Aiden soup when he was ill after cleaning his apartment. 

Aiden nods wordlessly. He can do this. Instructions are simple. One step after the next after the next after the next. He pads over to the table where he presses his hands perfectly flat on the surface. The wood stings cool under his sweating palms. He lifts his ass in the air, angling himself further down on the table when Duncan gives an appreciative grunt.

Then Duncan’s right hand starts massaging the globes of his ass and Aiden lurches forward with a whimper, his cock giving an almost painful pulse as it dribbles precome. 

Duncan continues kneading, his dry thumb tracing Aiden’s crack in teasing swipes. 

Aiden hears the telltale snap of a cap of lube behind him. He swallows, shuffling his knees apart, squeezing his eyes shut; his whole body flushes, knowing what’s coming next. Two slick fingers breach him, slow but insistent. It hurts, makes his thighs tense up real bad, but Duncan grabs his asscheek to spread him further and then crams his fingers down to the second knuckle.

Aiden whimpers at the stretch. “ _Fuuuck_ —” There are tears in his eyes, wet and stinging, clinging to his eyelashes. His cock hurts. So does his ass, but he also feels so utterly and wonderfully full. “ _Daddy_. _Daddy, it’s—_ ”

“Good?” Duncan asks, pulling his fingers out, thrusting them back in shallowly. 

Aiden nods. He wills himself to relax, to unknot the shivering coil in his stomach. He widens his stance, sock-covered feet sliding against the hardwood floor as Duncan starts fucking him with his fingers, really fucking him, nudging his prostate on every second thrust. He didn’t think it was possible, but he’s even harder now, slit pushing out clear fluid. 

“Do you think you can take another one?” Duncan asks, voice a low purr in Aiden’s ear. He smells like cigarettes and stale sweat, with a gunmetal sharpness that makes Aiden’s spine sing. “I bet you can come from this,” he says. 

Aiden whimpers. “But I want your cock. I want to come from your cock.”

There’s the barest glide of teeth on his neck. “Say please.”

“Pretty please?” 

There’s no time for shame; it’s easy to fall into this, because Aiden wants _so much_. He wants everything, and anything, he’ll beg on his knees if that means Duncan feeds him scraps from his table. 

“It’ll be _so good,_ daddy,” he pants, rolling his hips into the stretch in his ass, whining each time his prostate is rubbed. “I’ll be so tight for you. Gonna keep your dick nice and warm inside my hole. Come on, I want it. Please, please, please.”

“Greedy,” Duncan chastises, but he pushes in another finger alongside the first two and then sets up a relentless rhythm that has Aiden scrabbling the table for traction. He fingerfucks Aiden for a good few minutes, and then pulls his hand away and says, “Look at you, look at how greedy that hole is: you’ve done this for everybody, haven’t you?” 

“W-what?” 

It’s a game, a fantasy, because Duncan’s tone may be steely with warning but his hand on Aiden’s hip is gentle, grounding him to the present. Aiden swallows, trying to remember where he is, who he’s with. His rim stings where Duncan’s fingers are keeping him open, but Duncan doesn’t so much as dip a pinky inside. 

“N-no. What are you talking about, daddy?” There’s a glance of cold air across his ass, making his toes curl and his hole clench down on nothing. “Was saving myself for you. Been waiting for you to come home and fuck me. I’ve been so lonely.”

“So you let the neighbours give it to you. The man down the street. The plumber.” Duncan trails off, and Aiden whimpers when the pad of a thumb presses inside, circling, circling.

“Jesus—”

“Did you let the entire neighbourhood have you while I was gone?”

“What? N-no, that’s not—”

“In the living room, over my reading chair. Or maybe you let them press you down like this, showed them your bare ass to entice them.” There’s a noticeable rasp in his breathing now; Aiden can hear it close to his ear, Duncan’s hot breath. “Can’t blame them for wanting to fuck you. Ass like this.” He gives Aiden’s ass cheek a smarting slap that makes Aiden yelp and push out more precome. He squirms when Duncan cups it afterward, his skin tingling against the rough callouses of Duncan’s palm. 

“I’ll give it to you deeper than anyone ever could,” Duncan hums. “Do you want me to fuck you, Aiden?”

Aiden whimpers in response, nodding. He wants to touch himself just to relieve the pressure in his balls but he knows that if he does that now he’ll blow his load prematurely. Duncan’s fingers are buried inside his ass, rubbing his prostate in delicate circles while his other hand cups Aiden’s ass cheek to keep him open. 

He feels utterly filthy, taking it like this and loving every second of it. Duncan loosens him up, and Jesus it’s like he’s rattling around in there looking for spare change because Aiden keeps gasping nonsense, making sounds even he’s only ever heard in porn. Then Duncan’s fingers pull to offer him a brief reprieve, only to be replaced half a minute later with the blunt head of Duncan’s cock, slick and huge as it pushes in. 

There’s no more finesse, and Duncan has been rough with him but this is another thing altogether. 

Aiden feels like he’s being split in half. 

Duncan’s so big the stretch is making his eyes water. Inch after inch after inch, and Duncan makes good on his promise and takes him _hard_ and _deep,_ hips pressed snug Aiden whines as he tries bearing down _._ But it’s no use because Duncan is _huge,_ bigger than anyone he’s ever been with and almost too much for him to handle. 

Aiden can’t, he can’t do this, and he says as much, whimpering and balling his hands into fists on the table. 

“ _Daddy_ ,” he babbles. “Daddy, it’s too much!”

“Just breathe,” Duncan murmurs, steadying Aiden’s wriggling hips with a firm grip. He stops for the moment, only halfway in. Aiden glances over his shoulder. There’s still _so much of him,_ what the fuck. 

And then Duncan pushes in—all the way in—and Aiden’s breath stutters in his chest; he lets out a loud whine. He’s full, absolutely _stuffed_ now, and he can hardly move with Duncan pinning him into place with his cock. He wants to cry. Not from pain but the embarrassment of how good it feels.

“Daddy,” he whispers, and he lets the word roll off his tongue without a shred of self-consciousness for once. “ _Ah_ , fuu--you’re inside. I can feel you.”

Duncan nudges Aiden’s hips, forward, back, then forward again, fucking Aiden on his cock until Aiden gets the hint and starts meeting him halfway thrust for thrust. “I can feel you too,” Duncan groans. “Opening up for me. For daddy. Such a pretty little cockslut, aren’t you?”

Aiden can hear the metal clink of Duncan’s belt buckle each time he fucks in, as well as the wet slap of their bodies. For a while those are the only sounds in the kitchen, interrupted from time to time by Aiden’s soft whimpers, and the scrabble of his feet on the floor as he attempts to angle himself for each thrust. 

The socks make it difficult as he keeps slipping and sliding, but Duncan grabs handfuls of his ass, opening him, and suddenly it’s just _perfect_ , Aiden stretched to his limit with Duncan pounding into that spot that makes him see stars. 

_Fuck._

He’s never had sex like this before, where he’s taken so wholly, and forced into a complete surrender. And all he can do is spread his legs and take it, take it like Duncan’s good little boy, because he’s so desperate to be filled he’ll do anything for cock. He’s making a mess of himself, precome sliding down the length of his dick, drooling on the floor. 

Duncan presses two fingers into his mouth and without thinking, Aiden starts sucking on them. Duncan grabs a handful of his hair, and Aiden hisses, but he doesn’t stop sucking and he doesn’t stop rocking back against the punishing rhythm of Duncan’s thrusts.

Aiden knows he won’t be able to sit still tomorrow, maybe even for a few days. His whole body is attuned to the one place they’re joined where he feels the most pleasure. His toes keep clenching with every hard thrust; he’s so mindless with lust that he doesn’t even remember if Duncan put a condom on. He hasn’t, but it’s not like Aiden cares anyway. He wants to feel every inch of him, skin on skin. When this is all over, he wants to drip with Duncan’s come. 

The table makes a terrible whinging noise when Duncan pulls back before slamming back in—over and over until Aiden is so dizzy from the need to come that he’s floating, blissful, moaning incoherently. And then he’s being maneuvered onto his back, legs spread and ankles up in the air, gripped tight in each of Duncan’s hands. 

Aiden watches him, panting raggedly, waiting to see what he’ll do next. Duncan’s hair curls over one eye but he’s barely even blinking, his gaze dark, practically pupil. 

“Are you close?” he asks, such an absurd question Aiden starts grinning madly. 

“Yes, but I need you to touch me. My cock. _Please_.”

“No,” Duncan says. “You’ll come from this or nothing at all, Aiden.”

It’s a challenge, maybe a command, Aiden doesn’t even know anymore. He shivers when Duncan pushes back in, the stretch delicious from the new angle. 

“Daddy, _fuck_ , yeah, yeah—come on. Make me come, make me come. It’s so good, please.”

When Duncan starts pounding Aiden’s prostate like a battering ram, Aiden cries out, begging mindlessly. Still: his cock remains untouched, aching heavily between his legs and so, so sensitive. There’s a bead of precome pearling at the slit. He reaches out to touch himself—just a few short tugs because he’ll go crazy otherwise—but Duncan slaps his hand in warning.

“Lift your shirt,” Duncan says. 

“What?”

“Your shirt,” Duncan repeats, in the same even tone, like he’s not fucking Aiden within an inch of his life, making him feel every bit of it. “I want to see you playing with your tits. Show me, boy.”

Aiden gives himself a moment to catch his breath, and then he’s rucking his shirt up to his armpits and baring his chest at Duncan. His nipples are hard; he can feel how tight and sensitive they are exposed like this. He usually doesn’t have a problem taking his shirt off around people, he’s not some sort of prude, but this feels so intimately revealing, like he’s showing Duncan a secret part of him. 

Because of that, he hesitates. The back of his neck feels suddenly hot. 

“Touch them.”

Aiden doesn’t get a kick out of playing with his nipples but there’s something about Duncan watching him intently while he’s doing it that makes touching them somehow feel less weird. Almost pleasurable. He pinches them both between his fingers, lets them flush to pink pointy peaks before squeezing them again. 

Duncan groans, still watching him, his grip faltering on Aiden’s ankles. He’s close; Aiden can feel it in the way his thrusts change from filthy and penetrating to choppy and violent.

“Wait!” Aiden says, grabbing Duncan’s forearm before he can pull out. “Don’t pull out. I want to feel it. In me. _Please_.” He breathes out the last word, eyes lowered, cheeks as hot as his throbbing cock. “Daddy, please. I want your come.”

And that does it: Duncan starts fucking him, no holds barred. The table creaks under the force of it, sliding a foot across the floor. The neighbours can probably hear them; there’s no way they can’t with all the racket they’re making. Aiden can’t help his noises and Duncan seems to only encourage them, pistoning in with such single-minded intensity that Aiden’s toes keep tensing up in pleasure.

Aiden keens as his body shakes and his come splatters all over him, pearly jets across his stomach and chest. Duncan didn’t even need to touch him. Aiden had come from just getting fucked. 

Duncan grinds his orgasm into his ass, and it’s absolutely perfect. When he pulls out, Aiden feels hot come trickling out his hole and down the inside of his thigh. There’s so much of it; he’ll need to clean himself out in the shower later.

“You okay?” Duncan asks, cupping his face so Aiden will look at him. But he’s so pliant from his orgasm, suddenly so light that he can barely speak. His head lolls to the side but he manages to nod. His eyes are still damp and watery.

Aiden sways forward, dizzy from his orgasm but Duncan is there to catch him, his arms enveloping him loosely. He’s upright on the table, his toes barely touching the floor, his face pressed against Duncan’s shoulder. 

Duncan rubs his back under his shirt. 

“Welcome back,” Aiden mumbles sleepily. 

* * *

They take turns showering. 

Duncan emerges from the bathroom in black sweatpants sans a shirt. 

It’s the most undressed Aiden has ever seen him. The expanse of his chest is covered in a coarse film of dark hair threaded with grey curls. Duncan catches him staring but doesn’t say anything, just swipes his cigarettes from the nightstand and starts lighting up.

“You mind if I smoke?”

Aiden shakes his head. It’s his home; he can do whatever the hell he wants. He’d fucked Aiden in the kitchen, the same place he takes his meals. He can smoke in his own bedroom if he wants. “By all means.”

There’s a tickle of a scar that shows up faintly on Duncan’s belly. His left shoulder has echoes of another: painful looking, the skin newly healed. A bullet wound, maybe; Aiden wants to ask but doesn’t. He waits until Duncan has smoked his cigarette down to the filter before sitting up in bed and facing him fully. He wishes he had the foresight to pack for the night so he doesn’t feel woefully underdressed in his t-shirt from earlier and the same pair of boxers Duncan had ordered him to take off. He could be wearing pajamas. Instead he’s sitting in underwear that’s still a little bit crusty.

“You want me to scratch your back?” he asks.

Duncan throws him a questioning look, smoke rising in soft curls from his lips like a character from a movie filled in sepia. He’s so handsome, it makes Aiden blush to look at him sometimes. He tries to avoid getting caught staring but it’s impossible. He hates how he’s become one of those people who turn into this hallmark version of themselves that lives and dies according to the whims of others. 

Aiden pats down a curl where he can feel it sticking up on his forehead. Duncan is still looking at him; he can feel his gaze all the way down to the marrow.

Then he raises an eyebrow. “You want to scratch my back?” Aiden doesn’t know whether he’s being sarcastic, but he likes to give Duncan the benefit of the doubt. Until now, he’s never been anything but genuine.

Aiden shrugs.

Duncan grunts, but he rolls onto his stomach to give Aiden his back. He has scars there too. Aiden wants to trace each one as if somehow that can erase Duncan’s past but he doesn’t know how to ask and he’s certain he hasn’t earned the right yet. So instead he smooths his palm over the length of Duncan’s spine, tracing random patterns before digging his nails gently. He feels more than hears Duncan’s deep shuddering breath. Then his shoulders slacken as Aiden continues to scratch. 

Aiden used to have this stupid little lab he called Bandit as a kid. Loved him to death, let him sleep in his bed, even though he slobbered on everything and shed. Then one day he came home from school and there was no sign of Bandit anywhere. His kennel was empty; his toys were missing from the yard. His dad had given the dog away without telling him because he didn’t want an extra mouth to feed.

Aiden used to scratch Bandit’s back like this right before he went to bed when he was a kid with terrible anxiety and even worse dreams. It helped him sleep. Bandit was his only friend, his best friend, one of the last good things in his life after his mom died that his dad tried taking away from him. His old man could never beat the dreamer out of him. Burn his drawings maybe, but as Aiden got older he got more and more creative about hiding his sketches where his dad wouldn’t think to look for them. 

“So I’m the dog in this scenario?” Duncan asks. 

Aiden starts when he feels Duncan pat around for his hand and then squeeze. 

“It’s just a stupid story.” Aiden says, squeezing back and pulling away. “Do you still want me to continue scratching your back or not?”

“Sure.” Duncan shifts onto his front once more, arms clutching the pillow under his head. “Thank you,” he says before glancing over his shoulder to look at Aiden. Something about the gesture makes him seem young, like a little kid being tucked into bed, though his eyes remain rimmed with exhaustion, heavy with the threat of sleep, and his jaw is bristly with at least a week’s worth of stubble. Aiden realises for the first time since Duncan had arrived that Duncan hasn’t kissed him. It seems like such an innocuous detail to latch onto, but now that he’s thought it, he can’t let it go.

“I used to have a dog,” Duncan says, all of a sudden. His eyes are closed now, his voice faraway like he’s lost in thought. There are deeper lines in his forehead which can mean that he’s wading through old memories. “Bought this pug off the street in Montana. Cost me fifty bucks.”

Aiden skims his fingers over the topography of Duncan’s back, scars like river lines on a map. “What happened to it?” 

He can tell from the blank expression on Duncan’s face what happened it, but he wants to ask anyway, and hear it from Duncan. 

“Died,” Duncan says, his smile rueful. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I only had it for a day,” Duncan continues, undeterred. “Last time I’ll ever care for anything. But then I can never keep anything alive.” He huffs a small laugh at his expense. 

“I’m sure that’s not true. Some people just aren’t pet people,” Aiden says. 

“Then I’m not a pet person.”

“You still have that Peace lily I got you,” Aiden reminds him. “I’m sure you’ll manage to keep it alive.”

“Oftentimes things under my care don’t get the opportunity to thrive.”

Aiden lets the weight of that implication sit until even he’s at a loss for what to say. They sit in silence for a long time, so long that Aiden actually dozes off listening to the sound of Duncan’s breathing. 

He wakes up feeling more tired than usual and then realises that Duncan’s having a nightmare: he’s talking in his sleep in another language, fists clenched at his sides as if raring for a fight. There’s a soft sound, and it’s a hitch in the normal rhythm of his breath. It’s still dark in the room. Streetlight is bleeding in through the blinds, cutting slices of light across the carpet and throwing lines across Duncan’s face, scrunched in sleep. 

Aiden hesitates and then touches his shoulder. 

“Hey,” he says, gently. “Hey. It’s all right. It’s just a dream. Hey.” He strokes a hand over Duncan’s sleeping face. The skin is warm, so alive, and it’s a relief to know that he can be vulnerable, that he’s not some unfeeling machine programmed to follow orders and kill people; that he’s human just like everyone else, in this room and in this bed with him. That he can dream, even if his dreams take the shape of nightmares. 

There’s rapid movement behind his eyelids. Duncan is speaking faster, his words an incomprehensible mumble, his whole body tense, locked for a fight. 

And then Duncan’s eyes flash open to meet his, strangely luminous in the dark. It’s like looking straight at the barrel of a gun or into the shadowy mouth of a well—there’s nothing there, only darkness, the kind that will stay with you forever even in rooms with locked doors. 

“Duncan?” Aiden says, but Duncan is grabbing his wrist with a grip that’s hard enough to break bone. Then he’s locking his legs around Aiden’s waist and rolling them over, looming like a nightmare, his breath coming in ragged pants like a racehorse, the only sound filling up the room. 

Aiden can’t breathe and he realises with dawning horror it’s because Duncan’s hands are curled around his throat, cutting off his air. His vision is going grey at the corners; his lungs are burning. He can hear himself whimpering like a wounded animal; he can hear Duncan grunting with the effort to keep him still. He thinks of his father, the telltale footsteps outside his door at night. He thinks of the dog he used to have as a little kid who in the end couldn’t keep him safe because his dad got rid of him too like everything in his life that brought him joy. He thinks of his mom then starts to panic when he realises he can’t remember her face. 

There are tears in his eyes; they leak down to his ears.

He’s drowning, kicking and screaming in a sea that threatens to swallow him alive. Aiden swings a fist blindly, once, twice. The third attempt lands a blow to Duncan’s jaw hard enough to jar him back to wakefulness. The fingers around his throat start to loosen, and Aiden can breathe again in increments.

Aiden shoves Duncan off, scrambling off the bed so fast he falls flat on his ass. The bedside lamp flickers on, flooding the room with harsh orange light; he blinks and then stumbles even further back, ankle tangled in the fisherman’s net of blankets like a caught fish. He’s panting hard, clutching his throat where he can still feel the phantom weight of Duncan’s fingers choking him. He can’t speak. His hands are shaking. 

Duncan stares at him, and the colour has gone from his face. 

Maybe it’s shame or shock, but all Aiden sees when he looks at him is a stranger. 

This is a bad idea.

Duncan is bad for him, Aiden thinks, in the split-second it takes for him to push himself off the floor and right himself. He’s known this all along but let himself get carried away. Duncan isn’t safe, Aiden isn’t safe; there will always be a catch when he’s with him. The man kills people for a living. The sex was fun: but that’s just what it is: a bit of fun that means nothing in the grand scheme of things. 

Aiden will be a footnote in Duncan’s long and illustrious career as a hitman, another name to add to the list of people he’s fucked. There’s nothing special about him; there never was. And the fact hits Aiden now with a sudden rush of clarity. 

Duncan reaches out. “Aiden—” he says, but Aiden shoves past him. His steps feel shaky, weak, but he manages to locate his shoes in the foyer and grab his clothes on the way. He hears Duncan call his name again but he ignores it, taking the stairs two at a time and breaking into a sprint as soon as he bursts onto the street. He doesn’t stop running, head pounding in time with his heart, but then his legs start to give out and he slows down so he can hunker down on a slope on the sidewalk where it turns into a corner. 

It’s late. The trains won’t be running for another few hours.

Aiden cradles his face in his hands, raking his fingernails through his hair, leaving scores in the skin. The pain grounds him. The sleeves of his coat hang over his wrists; he stares at them without blinking. He’d taken Duncan’s coat by mistake— it smells just like him, and Aiden hates how that, like many other things about Duncan, is starting to be familiar. He’d take the thing off if only he wouldn’t freeze to the death. At least his clothes are his own, though he’d left both his phone and wallet back in the apartment. 

In the right pocket of Duncan’s coat is a crumpled up receipt with a phone number at the back. In the left is a flattened pack of Marlboro Lights, a chrome lighter with a faded sticker of a moose, and some loose change. Strange how ordinary that is, though Duncan is not, by any means, ordinary. 

Aiden lights a cigarette and breathes in deep. His hands won’t stop shaking, and he’d get up off the sidewalk but he doesn’t have the strength to move. So he smokes one cigarette after another, staring sullenly at passing cars, watching lights in the buildings across the street come alive, one by one. When he’s certain he can move again, he begins the long walk back to Duncan’s apartment, navigating the labyrinthian streets like Ariadne with a spool of string, every step leading him closer and closer to the minotaur. 

The door isn’t even locked. Aiden lets himself in and doesn’t knock. He keeps his shoes on so he can make a quick getaway, never mind tracking dirt into the apartment. He finds what he’s looking for before long: his phone and wallet are right where he’d left it on the kitchen counter. In the living room, on the couch, Duncan is asleep, his face so serene Aiden wonders what he’s dreaming about. There’s a glass of water on the coffee table next to a bottle of sleeping pills.

Aiden shrugs off his borrowed coat. He covers Duncan with it, though it’s too short to blanket the rest of him. Duncan doesn’t wake and Aiden is careful not to touch him again but he gives into the temptation at the last minute and strokes his fingers across Duncan’s hair briefly— softer than he’s imagined, but he’s never thought about the word in relation to Duncan. 

“Sweet dreams,” he says before he lets himself out of the apartment, locking the door quietly behind him. He slides into his coat—thin, the material battered, and regrettably not as warm— and then walks to the train station in the silent dawn. 

* * *

Another day, another job, and Aiden may have the good sense to feel embarrassed by how often he’s broke most days, but today is not that day. He accepts more part-time work: another cafe job, six times a week, from opening till closing. He’s there when the cafe opens, he’s there when it closes. 

He’s done this before: he can make coffee and memorise names, even the really difficult ones because his Romanian has improved considerably. He can do the dishes if he has to and scrub bathroom floors if it comes down to that. He can flash a smile for tips and charm tourists here on their gap year to try the cafe special—only five lei. He doesn’t think about Duncan. It works for a while, because oftentimes he’s too tired to worry about anything else but sleep.

The only other person he talks to these days is Oskar who shows up at the cafe after the lunchtime rush to harass him for free cupcakes. “Come on, just the one,” he says, whining like a little kid. “I don’t even care if it’s fresh or not.”

“The cupcakes are for paying customers. What are you even doing here? Don’t you have work?”

Oskar makes a face, leaning forward on the granite counter. “Got fired,” he mumbles. 

“What was that?”

Oskar shrugs and starts fiddling with the straw dispenser. Aiden swipes it from his hand and places it back on the counter next to the laminated card outlining the lunch menu. 

Business is slower than usual now that they’ve hit the middle of the week. His boss is in the kitchen catching up on some sleep and two of his coworkers are on lunch break. Only a couple of customers are in: a college student clacking away at their laptop, and a man wearing a trench coat reading _The Tourist’s Guide to Bucharest._ Aiden notices a second man hanging around by the expansive window in the corner; he looks familiar in a way that he can’t quite place.

Oskar interrupts that particular train of thought rather abruptly before it can nag at him like a burr to the brain. “You all right?” He glances down at Aiden’s neck, lingering thoughtfully before meeting his gaze. 

It’s only been a couple of weeks since that night. Aiden’s almost forgotten about it, mostly because he refuses to acknowledge it ever happened and look at himself in the mirror when he dresses in the morning. One of the requirements at the café is wearing a button up shirt which works well in hiding most of the bruising, but he hasn’t done laundry in a few days and his t-shirt’s collar isn’t high enough to cover anything. 

“It’s nothing,” Aiden lies, shuffling towards the other end of the counter because he’s terrible at confrontation. But Oskar doesn’t press, and soon the café is awash with activity again so he leaves Aiden to it. The thought of it irks him all night, however, and it all comes to a head when he’s walking the last stretch of sidewalk between the bus stop and his apartment building. One second he’s fumbling with the combinations of the new security code at the door, and then the next he’s looking down and there’s Duncan calmly gazing back from a lamp post, half shrouded in darkness. 

“Jesus—fucking—Christ! Duncan!”

Every muscle in Aiden’s body tenses. He’s gripping the strap of his bag in a tight fist, while his other hand closes around the keys in his hand, brass biting jagged marks into his palm. “How long have you been standing there?” 

Or a better question would be: _what the fuck is he doing here?_ Aiden’s not sure he wants to know the answers to either. Silently, Aiden berates himself for the rush of relief he feels at seeing Duncan again after several days, but the feeling is short-lived when Duncan pivots his gaze to Aiden’s neck. Aiden touches his throat self-consciously before jerking his hand away the second the door to the apartment building buzzes and a tenant exits the door behind him. 

They nod as they pass each other. 

Duncan waits until the man has rounded the corner before speaking again.

“Can I come up?” he asks. “Do you have some time right now?”

“I, um,” Aiden takes a casual step back, then another and another, widening the distance between them until his back hits the wall. “Actually, I’m really beat. I just got off work and I was planning to crash. It’s been a busy week.” Then he adds, because he can't stand the unreadable look on Duncan’s face, “Next time though?” 

“ _Next time_ ,” Duncan repeats, and his tone and inflection are both strange. It occurs to Aiden for the first time that he’s being the asshole in this situation, and that maybe Duncan isn’t here to knife him in the dark but to apologise for what happened. There is a fine line between rationality and fear and though they can choose to be adults about this and have a sensible conversation, Aiden prefers his own sort of strategy, tried and tested throughout history: avoidance. 

Because what Duncan doesn’t know is that he’s not the first man to hurt him, no, that privilege goes to Aiden’s dad who taught him the importance of sleeping with his fists closed and is the very reason Aiden is here, in Bucharest of all places, running from place to place like he can escape his ghosts. 

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” Duncan says. His hands have never left his pockets; Aiden wonders if he’s wearing his gloves. Off the clock means no gloves, on the clock means he’s wearing them. 

“I know,” Aiden says, and he huffs out a rueful chuckle. “You’re the absolute worst.”

“I’m aware of that, yes.”

“But I don’t hate you, you know,” Aiden tells him, because this is, at least, true and he wants Duncan to hear it. “I just—I’m really busy right now and I don’t think I can deal with anything else.”

“You’re still frightened of me,” Duncan states. He’s so matter of fact about it to a level that is almost infuriating; Aiden throws his hands up in exasperation.

“Of course I’m still frightened of you!” His breath steams the air when he throws his head back and laughs. “Jesus! I thought you were going to kill me! I’m fucking terrified. I didn’t mean it like that—it’s just. _Sorry_. I don’t know. You’re… you. And I’m,” he trails off, scrubbing his face. “Maybe you were right; maybe I’m just a stupid kid and I don’t know what I’m getting myself into.” 

“I never said you were stupid,” Duncan says. 

“Just a kid then.” Aiden doesn’t meet his eyes. He shivers in the ensuing silence. His whole face is starting to sting from the cold but he fights the urge to rub at his cheeks. Then he thinks of Duncan’s hands and how warm they must be. Duncan’s hands on his cheek, and his mouth warm too when he kisses Aiden. But there are bruises on his throat that remind him of the kind of man he is and can be if Aiden crosses the line.

“Of course,” Duncan says after a time, and his expression is so blank and flat Aiden wonders if they’re having entirely different conversations. “Next time, then.”

He turns and then walks away. 

“Next time,” Aiden echoes, but then some part of him has him calling out, “Wait!” And Duncan does a half turn, waiting for him to speak. Aiden was going to ask to see his hands. Somehow it had seemed important to know whether he was working a job tonight or not. Now Aiden realises there’s no point; that the answer doesn’t change anything, that the wolves inside Duncan will always be hungry, always be fighting. 

Duncan looks at him questioningly, haloed by the light of the street like some renegade angel come to wreak holy vengeance.

“Forget it,” Aiden says, swallowing. “Next time.”

This time Aiden doesn’t watch Duncan walk away. Instead, he slips inside the building and takes the stairs to his apartment. He shuts the door behind him, checking and re-checking the locks; then he makes dinner and forces himself to eat it while keeping an eye on the window, wondering if he’s being watched. He’s studying the ceiling, one arm pillowed behind his head, when his cell phone buzzes on the nightstand. 

Eventually he checks it but it’s just Oskar, wanting to know if Aiden still wants him to come over on Tuesday to help him fix the holes in his ceiling. 

Aiden stares at the screen, then at the state of his ceiling: the paint peeling off in flecks, the water dripping from holes here and there. He should move but he can’t afford it. He rubs at his chest. There’s an uncomfortable feeling behind his ribs, a dull sort of ache that makes him feel like he’s swallowed something that has suddenly decided to reside permanently in his chest. He contemplates sending Oskar a reply but closes his phone instead and shoves it underneath his pillow. But the feeling remains.

* * *

On Tuesday, they fill the holes in the ceiling with two coats of spackling paste. 

There is a three hour wait for the paste to dry, which Aiden spends trying to cobble together some lunch out of the contents of his fridge. Eventually, he comes up with a semblance of a meal: poor man’s salad made with leftover potatoes, onions, a dollop of mayo and two hard boiled eggs. 

By the time afternoon rolls around, they’re sweating down to their undershirts and the ceiling is mostly smooth, bright with uneven patches of paint that’ll probably need another round of sanding down. But it is what it is and hopefully that’ll be the last time his ceiling leaks.

With nothing to occupy himself with, Oskar starts poking around Aiden’s things, touching them and upsetting their placements. He picks up a random drawing from the pile on Aiden’s desk; of course, because Aiden is a slob and the universe hates him, it has to be one of Duncan. 

Aiden just shrugs in response when Oskar raises an eyebrow. He has a few of the same sketches lying around that he hasn’t had the heart to toss away just yet: variations of the same theme, of Duncan smoking a cigarette, the dark leather of his gloves stark against the cream paper, his eyes half-closed. He’d given the best one to Duncan, but kept the drafts to himself.

Oskar returns that evening with dinner from the Indian place three blocks down. He’d promised to stay until after they’ve finished coating the ceiling with another layer of primer and because, according to him, he doesn’t have anything better to do on a Tuesday night other than smoke weed and watch porn. 

“Hey Aiden?” Oskar calls from the doorway where he’s kicking off his shoes. “Uh, I think it’s your boyfriend. He says he’s here to see you? He followed me up.”

“What,” Aiden says and pushes himself from the windowsill where he’s been watching the street all afternoon, drinking cup after cup of coffee because he’s run out of alcohol to make himself sick. 

Sure enough there’s Duncan, standing outside in the hallway and not letting himself in. He’s wearing his gloves. Oskar looks between them, clearly full of questions but thankfully, he doesn’t ask any of them and just starts laying out the cutlery for dinner. Opening cabinets, closing them, making such an unnecessary racket Aiden has to roll his eyes. 

“Is your boyfriend planning on staying for dinner?” Oskar asks, because he delights in Aiden’s suffering.

Aiden makes plans to strangle him later when there are no witnesses. He shuts the door behind him, leaving it ajar so he doesn’t accidentally lock himself out. 

“Ignore him,” he says to Duncan, clearing his throat. “He’s an idiot.”

Duncan shrugs expansively. Even lit by the harsh fluorescent lights of the hallway, he looks good, his cheekbones sharp, his eyes hooded and full of dark promise. 

Aiden scratches the bridge of his nose, looking everywhere but him. “I thought we said next time?” he says, trying to go for casual even though his vision is starting to pulsate in time with his heartbeat from seeing Duncan again, so soon.

“We did,” Duncan agrees amiably. “But circumstances have come to a head and I wanted to say goodbye.” Then he clarifies when Aiden stares at him without blinking: “I’m leaving Bucharest.” 

It takes a minute to let that sink in. It’s an outcome Aiden has not anticipated. Then again he hasn’t really thought that far ahead. Just as when he’d first left home and he didn’t let himself worry about anything else but how to stay alive. Now Duncan is leaving, without even giving Aiden the choice to do the leave-taking himself.

“Is this because I’m giving you the runaround?”

“Are you?” Duncan has the gall to smile, the fucking bastard, though it hardly reaches his eyes and he’s being cagey as fuck. “I have enemies Aiden, and I’ve been in the city long enough to set some tongues wagging. I can’t stay even if I wanted to.”

Aiden doesn’t ask: _do you want to?_ Because he might not be ready for the answer. Suddenly he feels lightheaded, manic, and he tamps down the urge to laugh hysterically and also cry. It’s been a strange few days; he keeps vacillating between moods.

“So this is it then,” he says instead. The inexplicable heaviness in his chest is back, though this time in addition to discomfort he feels winded too.

“This is it.” Duncan reaches out and when he cup Aiden’s cheek, Aiden flinches from the cool impersonal touch of a leather glove then takes a step back without thinking. “Sorry, I—” he stammers, because he knows what that must look like to Duncan: rejection. But he can’t bring himself to touch Duncan, at least not yet. 

The bruises may have faded to shadows but the memory still lingers; when he presses his fingers to his throat in the shower, he wonders how one person can make him feel so conflicted. He made a promise to himself when he was seventeen not to let anybody hurt him, if he can help it. But this is a different kind of hurt, and he hadn’t accounted for Duncan. 

“Good luck, then,” Aiden says, short of lifting his hand in a wave. “With everything.”

Duncan takes it with a degree of breeziness that’s downright insulting. Or maybe it’s him keeping appearances, tools of the trade and all that, the uncanny ability to remain unruffled despite the circumstance, ingrained into him by years of training. Aiden can barely remember if he’s seen Duncan blink since the conversation began.

“I’ll see you around, Aiden,” he says. Duncan gives him a curt nod before walking away.

Watching him walk away for the second time is even worse than the first and Aiden slumps against his front door when he shuts it behind him. He doesn’t let himself think. Just stands there, taking in the mess of his apartment: the buckets of paint on the floor, the plastic tarp spread across his tiny living room freckled with drops of paint. It all feels so mundane. _Is this really it_ , he ask himself. 

In the kitchen, Oskar has already finished setting the table. He’s picking at the side dishes, dipping his pinky into containers of dip in a way that will normally make Aiden wrinkle his nose but today he just lets pass. “Guess he wasn’t staying for dinner then,” Oskar muses. 

“Guess not.” Aiden takes the empty seat at the table and is halfway into his flat bread when he’s filled with the unbidden urge to move. To maybe go for a walk, get some fresh air, just get out, get out now, and before he knows it that same urge has him grabbing his coat from the hook behind the door and slipping on his shoes. 

“I’m going out for a smoke!” he tells Oskar. 

“You don’t even smoke!” comes the muffled reply, but he doesn’t get to hear the rest of it because he’s already out the door and taking the stairs. When he bursts onto the street, he’s panting, his heart hammering hard in his chest. He hasn’t thought this through but Duncan can’t have gone very far because it’s only been five minutes. 

Then Aiden hears it: the sounds of a nearby scuffle. 

When he rounds the corner, he sees Duncan standing over a couple of prone bodies on the ground, a curved knife gripped tightly in his hand. He’s breathing hard, grimacing. There’s blood on his lip where he’d bitten it. Blood on the ground too. Fresh and shining under the street light. Then Duncan meets Aiden’s eyes, and Aiden thinks he sees a flash of teeth before there’s a knock to his skull and the world turns suddenly shaky and dark.

* * *

Aiden dreams of snow. He’s trudging through knee-deep piles of it as snow falls like tinsel on the ground on Christmas morning; it catches in his eyelashes and his hair, then the snow turns to ash, and it tastes like blood, and then he wakes up in the dark with only a hazy recollection of what came before. Snow, but that doesn’t sound accurate, that one had been a dream. Duncan in the street, the dark shape of him, and then the next—

Aiden can’t move his arms and legs. Panic surges in his chest, threatens to escape in a scream through his mouth but there’s something in it too: a piece of cloth gagging him. He’s lying on his side and can’t see anything and he realises that’s because there’s a blindfold over his eyes. He’s pretty sure he has some sort of concussion too because his head is throbbing and he can’t concentrate. There’s some muffled noise and a commotion of voices but it sounds like it’s coming from another room. Maybe that’s where he is: a room. The floor is cold under his cheek and smells like cement. 

For a second, he wonders how and why he keeps getting into these kinds of situations. The thing with Vivian should have been a lesson, but like an idiot moth ruled by its lizard brain, he kept hovering close to the flame and ignoring all the red flags. 

Aiden doesn’t know how much time has passed, just that he must have passed out again because when he comes to, there are hands on his face, cupping his cheeks. The leather smells familiar in a way he can’t pinpoint, then the blindfold falls away and he has to blink a few times to focus on the details of Duncan’s face: the worry in his eyes, the serious line of his mouth. His cheek is bleeding; there’s a deep cut across it, garish and likely to scar. It still feels like he’s dreaming; he can almost smell the sharp scent of snow in the air, the blood and the ash.

“Hi,” Duncan says, then without waiting for a reply, starts cutting the ropes binding Aiden’s ankles and wrists. He does so with such startling efficiency that it makes Aiden’s head spin though that can also be a symptom of the concussion. He sways when Duncan pulls him to his feet and wraps an arm around his waist. He has to constantly watch his feet because he keeps stumbling like he’s a toddler who’s only just learned how to walk. 

“Try not to fall asleep,” Duncan says into his ear. “Stay with me, now.”

“Where else would I go?” Aiden asks. 

Duncan doesn’t answer. 

They limp down a long hallway, lined with door after door after door. It’s almost shocking to see how ordinary everything looks. Aiden is expecting abandoned warehouses and underground bunkers rigged with explosives but they must be in a house in a nice neighbourhood somewhere because of all the pictures on the walls and the paint matching the carpet. The only indication that this situation is nowhere near ordinary is the sight of dead bodies on the floor. Aiden counts six, then stops counting because his head starts to throb again.

He stares at Duncan’s profile so he has something to focus on, when an abrupt pain zips through his arm. The shock of it is enough to make him stagger, and he falls awkwardly to the side when he realises he’s been shot.

Aiden barely has time to blink before bullets start flying in their direction.

“Stay down!” Duncan barks, as if Aiden is likely to start waltzing out of the room any time soon. In addition to the pounding of his head, there’s a sharp pain in his arm. When he glances down, he finds his sleeve ruined and streaked with blood. 

Duncan makes a gesture with his fingers to indicate Aiden stay put before going utterly still himself, an unmoving silhouette against the wall. 

When he moves next it’s with lethal accuracy: firing several shots through the window, and then spinning around with his back to the wall for cover. There’s an answering round that follows, splintering wood in the air, but Duncan barely pauses for breath to reload his gun. 

Aiden watches him with the grim calmness of someone who is so deep in shock they’re having an out-of-body experience. A second later the silence stretches but Duncan waits a moment longer before dropping on his knees in the rubble and crawling towards him. 

He smells like sweat and gunpowder, and his hair hangs like a veil over Aiden. “You all right?” he asks, and the look on his face makes Aiden pause, and then panic because he’s just been shot and that can’t be good. He’s never been shot before. Chased through the woods by a pack of wolves yes, beaten within an inch of life, sure, but never shot. 

“Jesus, fuck,” he gasps, lapsing into full blown hysterics. “What the hell is happening, where am I, fuck, I’ve just been shot. Jesus, I’ve just been shot—”

Duncan steadies him with a mild frown before Aiden can paw at his arm and check on the extent of the injury. “You’re hit,” he says, as if Aiden isn’t already aware of that. He’s surprisingly matter of fact about it but this is probably because it happens all the time. He’s used to blood and injury; these are the consequences of his chosen trade. 

Then his knife makes another appearance. Duncan isn’t the type to scramble or panic, but his movements are overwrought with tension as he uses the knife to cut open Aiden’s sleeve where the bullet has torn it open. His gaze flickers up to meet Aiden’s briefly before he starts scrubbing a hand over his face and smearing it with grime. He looks— _relieved,_ his knife disappearing with a hiss of air as he tucks it away and pockets it. 

“You’ll be fine,” he tells Aiden, patting him on the face hard enough to jar the inside of his skull. Both hands on his face, the cool leather oddly comforting, his thumbs pressing the corners of Aiden’s lips, and Aiden closes his eyes and lets a shiver run through him down to the soles of his feet. “It’s just a graze, Aiden. Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you patched up, I promise.”

“Thanks for the prognosis doc,” Aiden huffs as Duncan tugs him up by his good arm. “I’m only bleeding here.”

Duncan grunts as if the mild puddle of blood is entirely negligible. They make their way past more bodies, sidestepping so many Aiden has to bury his face in Duncan’s shoulder so he doesn’t start throwing up. Duncan leads him outside and down the sidewalk where a black jeep is parked so casually that it’s almost surreal, here in the middle of a neighbourhood where the sizes of the houses speak largely of the kind of lifestyle only few people can afford.

Duncan helps Aiden climb up the passenger seat. When they’re ten minutes into the highway, he noses the jeep off the side of the road and ties a makeshift tourniquet firmly around Aiden’s elbow. Then he gives him an unreadable look before asking him to pass him the alcohol.

“It’s in the duffel in the backseat,” Duncan instructs, pulling back onto the highway to join the slow procession of cars trying to figure out the next exit.

Aiden retrieves a duffel from the inky depths of the backseat and sure enough there’s a handle of vodka—the good kind—sitting among an assortment of other things inside: wads of cash wrapped in plastic, two semi-automatics, a hand grenade; there’s a change of clothes and half a turkey sandwich sweating in a paper wrapper which makes Aiden aware of the emptiness of his stomach. He passes Duncan the bottle after some fumbling, eyeing him dubiously the entire time. 

“I was hoping that was for me,” he says, hand still clamped around the gash in his arm. He clumsily attempts to clip his seatbelt on and succeeds after four pathetic tries.

“It _is_ for you,” Duncan assures him, as he takes a swig from the bottle, then another. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but there are heavy clouds in the sky, signs of an oncoming storm. Duncan squints at the windshield, streetlight throwing lines of shadow across his face. 

“Should you be drinking?” Aiden asks, just as Duncan passes the bottle back. 

“I’ve been doing a lot of things I shouldn’t be doing for a while now,” Duncan says, stoic as ever. Aiden has no doubt about it, nor of the fact that Duncan probably gets away with doing said things. He takes a sip of the vodka—three in rapid succession but his movements are so uncoordinated that he ends up spilling it all over himself. Waste of the good stuff, and he sighs when he misses his mouth again for the nth time. He gives up with a frown. 

“Don’t drink too much.” 

Aiden wedges the bottle between his thighs so he can concentrate on putting the cap back on. “I’m not the one behind the wheel,” he mumbles. 

“You might have a concussion,” Duncan says, darting a look at him before turning his attention back to the road. “So it’d be best if you didn’t fall asleep until we’re sure.”

Aiden lets that sink in. His arm is still throbbing and he can feel his body trembling in response to the pain. He wants to throw up but his stomach is warm from the vodka and it settles him like a hand on a feverish cheek. He hugs the bottle in his lap, then trains his gaze out the window. 

They drive for a full hour, not speaking. Aiden is only aware of the passage of the time from the way the sky lightens from smooth milky shadows to the blush of early dawn. 

And the road goes ever on and on: snaking through cliffs hugging snow-capped mountains, past fields filled with swaying corn and cows raising their heads in greeting as they drive past. They’re the only ones on the road, surrounded by sky, trees, and endless hills rolling upwards to cliffs.

By the time Aiden summons enough sense to ask where they’re going, they’ve already arrived at their destination. Duncan kills the engine in front of a dirt path sloping up to meet a quaint little cottage tucked beneath a thicket of trees. The walls are made of crumbling stone and the chimney puffs tufts of smoke like something out of a storybook.

He’d ask if they were going on vacation but then the lights on the windows flicker on and a woman with tight black braids walks out the front door carrying an assault rifle. Duncan sighs before climbing down the driver seat and meeting her halfway with the steely determination of someone on death row. 

It’s only then that Aiden notices it: the signs of wear on his body, how he’s favouring one leg over the other and keeps one hand pressed to his side. It occurs to him that Duncan might have been hurt all this time, but he hadn’t said a word about it because he didn’t want Aiden to panic. 

He doesn’t know how to feel about it: horrified or infuriated or maybe a combination of both. That Duncan wants to keep him safe is touching but the fact that he thinks the only way to do it is by keeping him at arm’s length is offensive. 

The woman stares at Duncan, cocking her rifle once in warning before pointing it straight at him; her stance never wavers and it’s clear she’s had military training. Duncan raises his arms in a surrender, and they exchange a few clipped words. At her nod, Duncan lowers his arms in increments but then he wobbles on his feet and lists to the side, losing his footing and that’s it: he’s toppling like a deck of cards. He doesn’t get up again. The woman stares at him but she doesn’t help him up or do much of anything. 

Aiden wrenches himself out of his seatbelt so fast he stumbles several times. His thoughts race a mile a minute. _What if he’s died, what’s going to happen now. Stupid fucking bastard keeping him in the dark. Fuck, everything hurts. Fuck, he’s dead isn’t he._ He whimpers in sheer relief when he feels the rise and fall of Duncan’s chest underneath his palm, his slow and steady heartbeat. _Shit. Fuck_. There are tears in his eyes, stinging his cheeks. 

“He okay?” the woman asks, turning to him, dark eyes piercing and just the little bit confused. Her coat looks cosy, an odd juxtaposition to the assault rifle probably twice her weight hefted across her shoulder. To add to the disorientating image, she’s also wearing matching brown moccasins. “Are _you_ okay?”

Aiden laughs. It feels cathartic, like the first breath of air after drowning. He laughs and laughs until his belly hurts from the force of it, then he crumples on the ground next to Duncan, staring at the expanse of sky. A huge, draining rush of energy leaves him feeling like a deflated balloon.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” he says, and it doesn’t take too long before he’s doing just that.

* * *

The woman’s name is Jazmin. Most of her friends call her J, only her great aunt calls her Jaz, and because she’s never met Aiden before, she’d prefer that he never refer to her by name at all. Still: she’s nice about Aiden throwing up on what is ostensibly her front lawn. She says it happens to all of them, whoever ‘them’ is. 

Jazmin pours him a glass of water from the tap. When she offers him a plate of crackers to nibble on, Aiden surprises himself by accepting it without complaint despite the distinct impression that he’s being coddled. 

The crackers help: they give him something to fixate on other than Duncan’s still unconscious body, stripped down to the waist and draped on the couch. The worst of his injuries are on his upper torso: some cuts, a few wounds that appear to have reopened, fresh ones that are still bleeding. 

Aiden excuses himself to the bathroom before he starts throwing up again. 

When he returns a few minutes later, his face dripping with water and his stomach empty again for the second time that day, Jazmin’s in the midst of stitching up a wound. Aiden watches her touch Duncan with a kind of familiarity that makes him uncomfortable. Her hands are steady and efficient, her stitches neat and orderly; she cuts the thread with the sharp snip of a hemostat and then dresses the rest of Duncan’s injuries, applying some kind of ointment before taping the worst of them up with gauze. It’s not the first time she’s done this. They have a history, that much is clear, and it’s only a question of just how further back it stretches.

“What’s in that?” Aiden asks as Jazmin takes the cap off a syringe and searches for a vein in Duncan’s inner arm. She finds it quickly, punctures the skin without blinking, thumb stroking his arm afterwards. 

“Just a mild sedative,” Jazmin hums, so shameless and candid about it that Aiden doesn’t know what to say for a moment. “He likes to pick at his wounds sometimes. Nasty little habit of his. This’ll help him relax.”

Duncan makes a soft noise, unintelligible, as if in reply. His eyes are half open and watery, but it’s clear he’s not awake—not completely. His head starts drooping to one side, in an angle that must be uncomfortable to wake up from. Aiden reaches out to right him but it’s Jazmin that gets to him first. She slides his head back into place, her knuckles brushing his cheek to check his temperature.

“Are you a doctor?” Aiden asks. 

Jazmin sets the syringe down on a surgical tray and smiles at him over her shoulder. Her expression may be sharp and appraising but there’s something soft about her gaze. “No, but I used to be a lifeguard when I was in college.”

“I don’t think mouth to mouth is gonna help him.”

Jazmin laughs. “Well, I wasn’t gonna give him mouth to mouth, sweetie.” 

Aiden doesn’t respond. He knows she’s just teasing but he can’t help but feel resentful. 

“Don’t worry about him,” she says gently, mistaking his silence for worry, “It’s gonna take more than a few bullets to kill this old bag of bones.” Then she asks, still appraising him, “You his kid?”

Aiden looks at her sullenly.

“Relax, I just wanted to ask.” That same look again, the one that makes him feel incredibly young despite them being only a few years apart. Maybe Duncan has a type and just doesn’t own up to it. 

“You look nothing alike anyway. You’re too pretty.”

Aiden snaps his cracker in two instead of responding. He stuffs half into his mouth and doesn’t look at her until she gets up and starts putting away her supplies—cleaning her tools, keeping herself in motion to give him some personal space. He hears the water running in the kitchen, the scrape of a chair and humming. More humming. Then she returns to the living room with a box of fresh gauze and a mildly amused expression. “Come on, let me have a look at that.” She gestures to his arm. 

Reluctantly, Aiden concedes, but only because he’s still in pain. The events of the last few hours may have diverted his attention from it, but the fact of the matter is, his arm is missing a chunk of flesh and his wound is still bleeding sluggishly despite Duncan’s best efforts at first aid.

“Does it need stitches?” he asks, as Jazmin attempts to untie the tourniquet, then failing that, cutting the tight knot with a pair of scissors.

She hums again. Aiden isn’t particularly assured by the sound of it. “Have you ever gotten shot before?”

“No, is that relevant?”

Jazmin starts cleaning around the wound with a cotton ball soaked in antiseptic. “Yeah, it needs stitches.” She ignores his hiss of pain and maybe it’s retaliation for acting like such a brat, because she presses harder until the cotton turns dark with blood. “Bullet just grazed the skin but you’ll want to stop bleeding. It’s not good for you, you know. Bleeding.”

Aiden doesn’t smile. She gets the hint after that.

* * *

For the next twelve hours, Aiden doesn’t sleep. 

Then the exhaustion simply hits him out of nowhere like a fist to the face while he’s helping Jazmin make lunch and peeling potatoes for the stew; he barely makes it to bed before he’s slipping into unconsciousness, a haphazard starfish with a bedroom slipper dangling off one foot. This time there aren’t any dreams. Or if there are any, he doesn’t remember them. 

When he wakes up, a whole day has passed and he’s seized for a moment by a sudden panic before he remembers where he is. 

He takes a careful shower, managing to dress himself without incident, and makes himself four slices of toast which he takes to the living room.

Trying to make sense of the events of the last few days just gives him a migraine so he elects not to think about anything at all. 

Duncan is, of course, still asleep, and Aiden should not have expected anything else, but there’s some relief knowing he’s still breathing. That he hasn’t somehow gotten up in the middle of the night and left.

“Wake up,” Aiden whispers, hovering above him, close enough to touch. Then a little more firmly: “Wake up, _bastard_.”

But Duncan doesn’t move. 

He smells like illness, though Jazmin has assured him that he’s weathered much worse, that this is in fact a vast improvement from most states she’s seen him in before. She had watched over him on that first night, reading a book while Duncan slept, coke-bottle glasses slipping down her nose, and Aiden had to shuffle out the room quickly before he felt like he was intruding. He should have been the one watching over Duncan but he’d been wandering the fields instead, avoiding having to look at him because the sight of him half-dead infuriated him to the point of tears.

There are questions he wants to ask, but he wants the answers to come from Duncan. First being: _what’s going to happen now?_ What’s the point of all this when Aiden’s just some kid he’d fucked? It was supposed to be fun. It wasn’t supposed to escalate. 

Aiden finishes his toast. 

Crumbs spill across the carpet where he’s sitting with his legs crossed. He hasn’t bothered to turn the lights on but there’s something soothing about being in the dark like this listening to Duncan breathing, and the rest of the house breathing along with him— the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the chirp of crickets in the long grass outside, the scratch of Duncan’s hair across the pillows as he shifts minutely in his sleep, and Aiden’s own sighs as he rests his head against Duncan’s good arm jutting over the edge of the couch cushions. He nods off on the floor and doesn’t get up until morning. 


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He can leave Aiden here, where it’s safe, where he won’t be found, and Duncan can resume his life of death and occasional debauchery and that will be that, happily ever after, the end. Or he can take Aiden someplace else—somewhere near the sea where the sky is the bluest it will ever be and the water is warm when it laps at your feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end!

* * *

The first thing Duncan does when he wakes up is try to remember exactly where he is. He’s no stranger to waking up in strange places—that time in Belarus and Harbin, that time in Chennai—but it’s not often he’s woken up by the consuming need to _just eat something_. Anything. 

He’s in Jazmin’s house, he knows that at least, and so he feels his way through the familiar dark, stumbling with every step into the direction of the kitchen. Jazmin had hooked him up to an IV drip and he keeps knocking the pole over several pieces of furniture, but the need for food overrides the dull throb of pain in his body as well as the negligible twinge of the occasionally stubbed toe.

Duncan finds the fridge, grunts at the wash of warm light pouring over him as he tugs on the chrome handle. There’s just leftover beans and rice, which he can’t be bothered to heat up, a few bottles of beer which might tide him over on any other day but his grip is still pretty weak and he doubts he can locate the bottle opener. He settles for a hand of bananas sitting in a fruit bowl. There are four them, and he eats each one in rapid succession.

That’s how Aiden finds him, hunkered down at the kitchen table surrounded by banana peels and halfway into his fourth banana. 

“Duncan?” he says, and then flicks the lights on. Duncan squints against the glare, wincing as he blinks and then blinks again. Times like these he wishes he were more disciplined about wearing his glasses. Contacts make his eyes shrivel up so he forgoes them altogether and glasses are inconvenient if he’s working a job. 

It takes him a few seconds to focus on the details of the room: the floral curtains, the pots and pans hanging from a wooden rack above the counter which he hadn’t noticed in the dark, and Aiden of course, wearing, it seems, clothing borrowed from Jazmin—a white nondescript shirt pulled taut at the shoulders and revealing a pale sliver of belly, grey sweatpants pinching at the ankles. Fittingly, he’s also wearing bedroom slippers a size too small. But it’s the expression on the boy’s face, something both lost and open, that moves him. 

“How’re you feeling?” Aiden asks. He still hasn’t left the doorway. He’s fidgeting, shifting foot to foot—all signs of anxiety and distress.

Duncan stares at the remainder of his banana before putting it down. He feels his stomach churning in protest. It takes him half a minute to answer that question truthfully. “I’ve been better.”

“You were asleep for nearly a week.”

“That long?”

Aiden nods. Briefly, Duncan wonders if the boy’s still afraid of him. He seems skittish, reluctant to get any closer. Duncan doesn’t hold it against him. He’d hurt Aiden, never mind that it wasn’t on purpose. It’s a reminder of the kind of man he is, the depths of violence he is capable of. No one is safe, not even Aiden in spite of his good intentions.

“You know where I can find my cigarettes?” Duncan asks.

Aiden nods again. He leaves without another word, then returns to toss Duncan his cigarettes and lighter. Still not getting any closer than a foot, the lighter skidding across the table and missing the table’s edge if not for Duncan reaching out to swipe it. 

They share a look. Duncan thanks Aiden before clumsily ambling his way out the door and onto the porch where he settles on the swing and attempts to light a cigarette. He hears the door creak open behind him but doesn’t look up. 

He gives up trying to work the lighter open and just sits there staring out across the dark fields with the familiar weight of a cigarette bobbing from his lips, a strange comfort after days spent on the couch flitting in and out of consciousness. His arms are pebbling in goosebumps; he should have brought a blanket. He’d woken up with his shirt missing, because to wear one would interfere with his recovery, put pressure on his still-healing wounds. He can feel himself shaking, a slight tremor in his jaw, and jerks in surprise when the weight of a quilted blanket settles over his shoulders.

Aiden shrugs in answer before taking the empty seat next to him, hugging himself in the cold, hunching forward on his knees. 

Purposefully not looking at him though there’s only an inch of space between them and Duncan can smell the shampoo in his hair, the warm skin smell of him that’s starting to become familiar in a way that should bother him but doesn’t. Duncan wants to put an arm around him— it would be easy, to reach out, pretend to stretch, and he considers it, but it’s been a while since he’s comforted anybody and it’s going to be awkward with the IV pole standing in the way. 

There’s a breeze skittering across the fields, sending blades of grass rustling. Trust Jazmin to pick somewhere in the middle of nowhere to put down roots. Duncan has always thought of settling as the worst kind of death, but sitting here in silence with the air bracingly sharp in his lungs puts him in mind of the books he used to read as a kid. 

This is what happens at the end of every story, after all the monsters have been fought and the kings rescued. Duncan may not be the hero in this one but the last beast in a long line of monsters yet to be defeated, but even monsters want to come home. 

There’s no one else for miles away. No houses, the road empty like a dark ribbon; it’s just firmament and stars and next to him a boy he’ll fight tooth and nail to keep. Let him be the monster then, Duncan thinks. It won’t be the first time but it’ll certainly be the last. 

“You know, Jazmin asked me if we were related,” Aiden says.

Duncan lifts his head to look at him. “What?”

Aiden shakes his head in annoyance, fiddles with the hem of his shirt. “Asked me if I was your kid. Why do people keep thinking that?” 

“Because I’m too old for you,” Duncan says. “You also look like a teenager which is a bit… worrying.”

“Didn’t worry you when you fucked me,” Aiden mumbles. 

“Aiden,” Duncan says, unable to stop a quiet laugh. “Aiden, you’re a real fucking brat, honestly.”

“Yeah, well,” Aiden says, huffing, crossing and uncrossing his arms, fighting off a shiver. Duncan can hear his teeth chattering. Their shoulders brush, but Aiden goes utterly still the second he realises it, flinching away. “What are you gonna do about it, then?” he asks. 

Duncan can hear the ripples of discontent in his voice, see it in the fitful movement of his shoulders.

“Nothing,” Duncan says evenly. “I’m not going to do anything about it.”

Aiden opens his mouth. He looks like he has something to say, something Duncan may not like, hovering right there on the tip of his tongue, but he shuts his mouth with a clink and rubs his elbow instead. 

They let the silence grow between them. Duncan doesn’t mind it; he’s used to silences. He grew up in a house full of it, before making his own way in the world and throwing himself into the thick of war and violence where there was a symphony of noise all the damn time: gunshots, explosions, screaming. 

There’s always the screaming. If people weren’t begging for their lives, they were running for them but what they don’t find out until it’s too late is that it’s all futile; Duncan Is like a trained bloodhound or the grim reaper himself armed with a machete and sporting an immaculate moustache; if you’re on the list, he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. There’s no hiding from him. Whatever hole you’ve managed to crawl into, or how ever many locks you have on your doors and windows won’t matter. He’ll always find you. He’s good at what he does.

Aiden slides over and pries the lighter from Duncan’s loose grip, the sudden movement and touch interrupting Duncan’s thoughts like a shot. Aiden clicks the lighter open, once, a small spark flickering to life, then leans in to light Duncan’s cigarette, gaze flicking at him then away. There it is, up close: the familiar smell of his hair. Aiden takes one side of the blanket and tucks it around him. Their shoulders brush again but this time Aiden doesn’t move away and neither does Duncan who doesn’t have the energy to, anyway. Another breeze, soft, and next to him Aiden shivers. His hands are clenched into fists on his knees, flexing and unflexing.

“You should put a shirt on,” Aiden tells him, keeping his eyes trained forward.

Duncan glances down self-consciously, stopping himself from picking at the patches of gauze taped to his torso like badges of courage. Or reckless stupidity, he thinks with a touch of wry amusement. He’s always been the type to shoot now and ask questions later; one of these days that’s going to bite him in the ass. 

“I don’t know if that’s advisable. I’m going to need to ask my doctor.”

“You mean Jazmin,” Aiden says, and there’s something petulant in his tone that’s almost endearing, except he looks completely serious, his brow furrowed, his lips turned down into an unhappy line. “Did you two ever—”

Duncan knows where this line of question is going. Best to nip in the bud before the boy gets any funny ideas. Still, it’s a little amusing. He takes a long drag of his cigarette before passing it to Aiden who shakes his head so vigorously his curls bounce in the breeze. The same urge comes over him, stronger now, and harder to ignore but he beats it down bloody before it has another opportunity to resurface; he won’t touch Aiden again. He’d hurt him and by doing so, has lost the privilege.

“I was her mentor,” Duncan begins, but before he can continue that particular story, Aiden interrupts him. 

“Yeah, but did you two ever—”

“Ever what?” Duncan asks, wanting to hear him say it. He takes another pull of his cigarette, tilting his head up so he can watch smoke lasso around the moon and then fade into the dark. 

Aiden keeps his expression carefully neutral. He’s not very good at it. For a moment, Duncan is expecting him to do either one of two things: hit him or start crying. He’ll let him do both. There’s a lot of shit he let Aiden get away with on a regular, and the boy looks like he’s a hair's breadth away from breaking down.

“It sounds like there’s an answer you want to hear,” Duncan says. 

Aiden’s gaze is accusing, cold, a challenge altogether. “Maybe there is.”

“Am I supposed to guess it?”

Aiden snatches the cigarette from him. He stubs it on the railing, no warning whatsoever, the motion so quick and fluid that Duncan barely has time to flinch, wondering if Aiden is going to punch him. He would punch himself, maybe, if he were Aiden; he’d have it coming. 

But Aiden just presses close and then the stupid boy is kissing him—full on the mouth and very determined, making a soft noise at the back of his throat that knocks down all the walls of Duncan’s heart. 

“Aiden,” Duncan whispers but he still doesn’t touch him. Duncan doesn’t move his mouth from his; he can’t move his mouth from his, though he keeps himself unresponsively still, staring at the patterns of shadow across Aiden’s face. There’s a furrow between his eyebrows; his hair scratches at Duncan’s eyelids but he keeps his eyes open the whole time and he doesn’t blink. He can’t; he can’t make himself look away. He can’t bring himself to move. 

It’s Aiden who yanks himself away, eyes bright in the dark and shining with hurt, his breath ragged and steaming the air in clouds. 

This time Duncan is sure Aiden is going to punch him, there’s fury in his eyes, his jaw is tense, but instead he just gets up without another word and lets the door bang behind him when he leaves. 

* * *

Two weeks later, Jazmin emerges from the chicken coop half covered in feathers and says to him: “I heard about your predicament.”

“How?” Duncan asks, ignoring the throbbing behind his eyes as he peers into the cabinets for more Vicodin.

“People talk; you forget we keep a very close circle. And I still have friends in the business.“ She watches him putter around, opening and closing cabinet doors and making a general ruckus in her kitchen. 

“Contrary to rumour, I’m not some kind of shut-in.” She waits for a response; Duncan doesn’t give her any. “Silva, Duncan. Really? You couldn’t have picked someone else to piss off? Never really liked him, the guy’s an ass, but we’re not paid to like our clients are we? We’re paid to follow orders.”

Duncan grunts in reply and doesn’t elaborate on his reasons for doing what he did. He presses a hand to his stomach where there’s a brief flare of pain from a poorly timedmovement. He used to jump from one job to the next regardless of how badly he’d been hurt, adrenaline and seething anger the only thing fuelling him. He used to go on stakeouts for days, foregoing showers and sleep and still he’d be fine the next day after a nap and some coffee. 

But maybe this is just what getting older is like: your body starts to hate you, hair grows in strange new places, every now and then you forget where you put your keys. And you’re kept awake at night thinking of a boy half your age lying in the dark not so far away. What he’s thinking of, how warm his skin must be. The wet of his mouth. Maybe Duncan should have bought a shiny red car instead of bunking down in Bucharest and fucking a twenty six year old. Even men like him were not exempt from mid-life crises apparently. 

“You okay?” Jazmin asks, putting the basket of eggs away on the counter. “You want me to take a look at that?”

Duncan blinks at her, remembers the pain in his abdomen and lifts his hands, palms open. At least he can wear a shirt now, though it’s the same one he’d arrived in, run through the washing machine day in and day out until the threads have started to show wear. “No offence, but you’re not exactly Florence Nightingale.”

Jazmin smiles grimly, leaning her hip against the fridge, folding her hands over her chest. She has so many of these gestures that seem out of place with the military training ingrained in her. The first time they met, she was throwing a hand grenade into the air while an armed unit swarmed them en masse. That was eight years ago, when she’d only been twenty-one and wore her hair down to her shoulders.

“True,” Jazmin agrees, her gaze following him whichever direction he moves. “But I’m also not a licensed physician. At some point, you’re gonna have to stop running to me when you so much as scrape your knee.”

“A scraped knee I can take care of,” Duncan replies.

“But a pretty boy with a smart mouth?” Jazmin teases. 

Sometimes he resents how perceptive she is, though it’s one of the many reasons he took her under his wing. She’d been doing freelance work for Blut for a while, making her coin from jobs kept strictly off the books, before suddenly dropping off the face of the earth. 

Her name still gets bandied about from time to time because she’s as smart and reliable as they come—the kind of person you want covering your back on any two-man job. Also, she’s terrific with explosives and had the good sense, unlike most people, to disappear before the life wore her down. Duncan should take notes. 

“Speaking of,” Jazmin smirks, pointing behind Duncan before lifting an eyebrow. 

Duncan doesn’t have to look to know she’s referring to Aiden who has once again appeared without making his presence known. He’s been doing that often, flickering in and out of the periphery like some sort of sullen ghost, gliding silently behind Duncan or thumping objects around unnecessarily depending on his mood. 

Duncan’s never been good at talking to people—if he were, he’d be in an entirely different line of work—and so he doesn’t say anything at all and beats a hasty exit, ignoring the look of pure dismay on Jazmin’s face. 

Another crisis averted. He’d be accused of acting like a coward but when situations do not involve guns or some kind of explosive device or sharp object, he’s often at a loss. How do people behave around other people, he wonders. Between jobs, there’s often a struggle to relearn social cues. It takes him a while to get into the groove of things, to know when to laugh, smile or show genuine empathy.

Duncan spends the rest of the day holed up in Jazmin’s workshop, surrounded by the smell of clay and sawdust and her impressive attempts at sculpting, half-formed busts and little animal figures left to dry by the windowsill because even ex-contract killers need something to do when they retire. 

It’s the only place besides the living room with a couch forgiving enough to sleep in. 

He makes himself comfortable in it and picks up a book from the workbench— _The Sculptor’s Bible—_ and pages through it until he dozes off. By the time he blinks awake, four hours have passed and there’s an uncomfortable knot in his neck from sleeping with his head tipped to the side. He goes to piss and catches sight of his own reflection in the bathroom mirror: the bags under his eyes, his chapped lips. He rubs a hand through his beard, the result of weeks of being half-bedridden and leaving it untended. It’s thicker now than he normally wears it, itchy and catching crumbs of food which Jazmin thinks is hilarious.

At dinner, he finds himself scratching his jaw intermittently, and by the time the dishes have been put away, Aiden casting him furtive looks the whole time while passing Duncan a plate to dry, Duncan makes the decision to just get rid of it once and for all. 

Jazmin keeps razors in the medicine cabinet—three in one in a pack— and he takes one and sets it down on the sink as he washes his face with warm water. There’s a can of shaving cream in the medicine cabinet and he pauses a moment before turning it over in his hands, squinting under the dim light as he checks the instructions in the back. He’ll need his glasses, but he figures it’s all the same anyway. Same purpose, just packaged differently and smelling a lot more floral than he’d like. 

Duncan used to have a barber who would do this for him whenever he swung into town—good old Mr Jensen with the three sons whose names all begin with a J—but the shop had closed down years ago and the space was leased by one of those big name coffee chains. 

He has half the mind to track Jensen down but work keeps getting in the way, as always. It was one of the few things he looked forward to when he stayed in his Florida address: the powdery scent of industrial-grade shampoo, the abraded leather seating and mirror after mirror lining the walls, the rhythmic snip of Jensen’s scissors as he took inches off Duncan’s hair and trimmed his beard. A kind of ritual that helped him transition into civilian life. 

Duncan works up a lather, dabbing generous swathes of it down his throat and chin. He won’t shave too close to the skin—he _does_ prefer the look and feel of scruff on his jaw, makes him seem more dignified—just enough that he doesn’t look like a vagrant who ran into a spot of trouble with some street thugs. 

He has to be careful to avoid the cut in his cheek; it’s healed enough with the thin raised line of scabbing ready to come off, but he doesn’t want to agitate it prematurely which will in turn agitate Jazmin. He knows when he’s being a handful and he doesn’t want to undo all her hard work by picking at his wounds before they’ve completely healed.

When he finishes shaving, he finally feels like a semblance of himself again though his moustache has seen better days and his eyes can stand to look a little less bloodshot. His hair will have to be seen to another day; unfortunately, his dexterity with a blade does not extend to haircutting. 

He’s wiping his face with a hand towel when he looks up and sees Aiden in the mirror, standing by the open door with the usual scowl on his face. It’s like living with a teenager; Duncan’s glad he’s never had kids of his own. Aiden gets into these moods and Duncan doesn’t know how to pry him out of them short of using an actual crowbar.

“How long have you been standing there?” Duncan asks, glancing at him over his shoulder. Aiden shrugs, pushing his way through the door and shoving himself into Duncan’s personal space to reach for the toothpaste on the sink. 

Duncan hands it to him with pursed lips. He watches him carefully squeeze a tube of Crest onto the bristles before brushing his teeth with a kind of brutal intensity that’s both amusing as it is worrying. Still, Aiden doesn’t look at Duncan until after he spits into the sink and rinses his mouth. His mouth has no right looking like that, wet and red like the inside of a fruit.

Then Aiden says, without blinking, and knocking the towel out of Duncan’s hands, “I want to suck your cock.”

This is the moment Duncan starts laughing except all he does is stare back with some degree of befuddlement. Of all the things Aiden could have said to him, this is the most unexpected. They’ve barely talked since the night on the porch. Part of it is Duncan’s reluctance to approach him of his own volition, but Aiden has had a hand in it too: he’s been prickly since Duncan had brought him here, avoiding Duncan’s questioning looks in favour of checking his cuticles. 

“You just brushed your teeth,” Duncan points out more calmly than he actually feels. 

“Yeah, well I can do it again later.” Aiden lifts his chin, and Duncan wonders if he knows how inadvisable it is to bare your throat to the same man who almost killed you. Has it been a month since that night? Time has taken on a strange malleable shape since; Duncan doesn’t even know what day it is anymore.

Still, he is too thrown off by the offer to suck his cock to say anything, so instead he just picks up the towel he’s dropped on the floor and hangs it on a ring on the wall, smoothing it a few times just to keep his hands busy. 

“Did you just come in here to blow me?” he finally asks. 

“Yes,” Aiden says. No shame in it, rote, like he’s had nothing but time to think about it. He doesn’t even look away, the stubborn, stupid boy. And what’s to be done about that?

“Aiden,” Duncan says. When he meets that plaintive gaze, he merely raises an eyebrow, because it doesn’t seem like Aiden will be backing down—not anytime soon. 

“Look,” Aiden says. “Do you want me to suck your cock or not? I’m not going to ask again. It shouldn’t be difficult: yes or no, it’s not rocket science. I’m not afraid of you, and you’re being an idiot if you think I don’t want this.”

“Do you?” Duncan asks, and he’s being cruel now, he knows, but there’s a thrill to hearing Aiden say it. “Do you want it?”

 _“Please,”_ Aiden says, his tone pathetically desperate and slipping precariously into a whine, and that’s it, the final nail in the coffin, all of Duncan’s self-control goes crumbling down because he’s never met anybody who’s ever begged as prettily. 

Duncan snorts out a laugh. “Stupid boy.” 

“I’m not the one with bits of shaving cream on their face,” Aiden says, always needing to have the last word because he’s a brat, a real fucking brat. Sometimes, Duncan thinks maybe he’s been too lenient with him, and this is his fault, really, he let Aiden get away with so much. Duncan rubs at the spot he’s missed with his thumb, frowning at his reflection in the mirror. Then he turns around to face Aiden.

“Go on then,” he says to him. He’s not whispering, but his voice is low, scratchy with desire. “If you want to suck me off, you’re going to have to do it _naked_.” He enunciates every syllable, inflecting every word so there can be no mistaking his meaning. 

Duncan pushes his hand on Aiden’s shoulder but he doesn’t have to—Aiden gets to his knees almost immediately. 

“Clothes off,” Duncan reminds him. 

Aiden whimpers before shucking off his clothes with quick, overeager swipes. Duncan’s almost forgotten how beautiful he can be without any clothes on, more so on the throes of arousal: his nipples flushed to hardened peaks, his spine arched in a feline curve, his plump cock canting and already making a mess. 

The boy clearly knows no shame. Those eyes, that hungry mouth; Duncan wants to tear him apart until there’s nothing left for anyone; until he’ll be the one thing to ruin him that Aiden can never come back from. 

“You want my dick in your mouth, boy?”

” _Yeah_ ,” Aiden breathes, sounding heady with it already, like he wants nothing more. “I want it in my mouth.” He shifts on the tile so he’s precisely where he should be: face to face with Duncan’s crotch. Aiden flicks a feverish gaze up at him, blinking only once as he presses his face against Duncan’s thigh, letting out a soft moan. 

“God, you’re big,” he says as he cups Duncan over the flannel, kneading his palm over and over until Duncan twitches and hardens. His breath steams against Duncan’s cloth-covered cock, his hair tickling Duncan’s thigh.

It doesn’t take too long until Duncan fills up to full mast. The boy obviously knows what to do— sliding Duncan’s briefs down to hang below his heavy balls, his fingers hooking into the elastic and tugging. He takes Duncan’s cock in a delicate grip before darting his pink tongue out to taste the bead of Duncan’s precome.

He’s good. Duncan doesn’t want to think about what that can mean. It doesn’t seem polite to thrust your dick into someone’s mouth and then wonder how they learned their technique, but Aiden is _good_ , and this is not his first time that’s for sure.

Aiden starts licking the head before sliding his tongue down, all the way down until he’s flicking it across Duncan’s balls, sucking them, taking them into his mouth one at a time. 

Duncan groans and shudders. His hips pulse in Aiden’s hands, and he braces himself against the bathroom wall, sliding his cock between those spit-slick lips, careful not to hurt Aiden with his steady thrusts. He’s too big for him. Empirically, he knows not everyone can take him unless their gag reflex is next to non-existent, but he’ll give the boy a gold star for trying because Aiden seems determined to swallow him to the root, no matter what. 

Aiden closes his lips over Duncan’s cockhead, stroking the shaft with one hand, while the other curls around Duncan’s hip to hold onto him. He’s starting to choke, starting to drool, and his cheeks are wet with fresh tears when Duncan reaches down to curl a hand in his hair to ease him into a gentler rhythm. But Aiden won’t stop sucking, won’t stop moaning, like this is the one place in the world he wants to be, and this is the only thing he’d rather be doing: sucking Duncan’s cock on his knees. 

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Duncan warns, hips jerking faster now that the friction has become smoother.

Aiden pops off with a smacking noise, drool and precome dribbling down his chin. 

He’s hard; Duncan glances down and sees the angry curve of his erection puddling a string of clear precome on the floor, but Aiden knows not to touch himself, or maybe he’s simply a masochist. His cock looks like it hurts and Duncan can only imagine how sensitive it must feel, every small touch excruciating like touching a livewire. 

“What if I want you to hurt me?” Aiden slurs. “What if I tell you to?”

“You’ll hate me,” Duncan says.

Aiden laughs. “I already hate you.” It must only be half-true because then he’s back to sucking Duncan off mere seconds after the admission with the kind of focused intensity Duncan’s only ever seen on seasoned cocksuckers. 

Duncan backs off so he can adjust the angle of his hips; Aiden’s throat constricts around him; he can feel him trying hard not to gag, saliva filling his mouth as Duncan pulls out and then shoves back in, only able to cram himself halfway despite Aiden’s best efforts.

“It’s all right,” Duncan sighs, when Aiden starts making distressed noises. He strokes a thumb over his bulging cheek. “You’re still my good boy, Aiden.” 

Aiden whimpers, eyes glittering with a new wave of tears as he nods and nods again. “ _Daddy,_ ” he sobs, “ _Daddy, I’m sorry_.”

Duncan holds himself still with his forearm pressed against the wall while his free hand grips Aiden’s hair tight. It catches him off guard, how soft Aiden’s hair feels between his fingers. He yanks him forward, once, and hovers on the precipice, as Aiden fights to loosen his throat and hold him between his lips. 

Duncan’s fingers slip down to cup the side of his face, cover the pale shell of his ear. He’s beautiful: on his knees like this.

“Swallow it,” Duncan grunts, tracing the flushed bow of his throat. “Come on, now. I know you can do it.”

Aiden whimpers again. 

When Duncan comes, there’s no delicacy to it, his hips stuttering as he explodes in Aiden’s mouth. Aiden gasps, breaking off with a strangled noise, tongue lolling out, but he swallows what he can and when he looks up at Duncan, wiping his mouth on the back of his arm, he looks endearingly triumphant. 

Duncan hauls him to his feet and pins him against the sink to face the water-spotted mirror. 

“Hands on the sink. Ass up.”

Aiden obeys. It takes so little to wind him up—he’ll do anything Duncan tells him which is both worrying in itself but also a marvel. There’s a tube of oil in the medicine cabinet which Jazmin probably uses on her hair but it does the job passably and Duncan’s fingers are slippery within seconds, enough that he can slide two inside Aiden’s hole. He meets Aiden’s gaze in the mirror. 

Aiden merely grins back, lazy and languorous though the line of his back tenses up when Duncan pushes in to the second knuckle.

“You’re a greedy fucking brat,” Duncan says, fucking him with his fingers, no finesse whatsoever, as he rubs mercilessly against the boy’s prostate. A palpable shudder runs through Aiden’s spine, and all he can do is writhe senselessly and groan as Duncan screws into him so hard he nearly slides across the tile if not for his white-knuckled grip on the sink. 

Duncan presses his nose to Aiden’s neck, breathes in his scent laced with sex. 

Aiden’s hair scratches his cheek; he turns his face towards it. Then he pries Aiden’s hand from the edge of the sink and guides it to wrap around his own cock. 

Aiden has beautiful hands—long fingered and delicate. Not as soft as they appear to be because they’re rough with the callouses of hard work, but Duncan can’t help but be drawn to them anyway. Smeared with paint and ink, or curled around a pen, they steal his gaze to the point of distraction. And they look so beautiful touching his own heated skin, jerking his fat cock off until the head starts pushing out more precome. 

Duncan’s hand circles Aiden’s and they stroke his cock together, rough and fast, their combined rhythm uneven. Aiden arches up and nods; he nods and keeps nodding, panting under his breath, grinding down against Duncan’s fingers, then rocking his hips forward. “Yeah, please, please, just like that— _please—I want—I want—”_

Whatever Aiden wants from him, Aiden’s going to get, for as long as Duncan can possibly provide it. This is the most dangerous thought of all because it feels close to the truth, now more than ever. 

Duncan had already walked into the lion’s den for him, he’d upend hell many times over just to bring the boy back, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do. 

He’s proven what he has always feared: that sometimes it takes so little to kill a man. He let the boy be his undoing—the Black Kaiser, whose reputation precedes him wherever he goes and whose paths were chosen long ago and he can never leave, unravelled like a spool of thread. 

Then Aiden is whining, sudden, high and desperate, and he’s trembling, head tossed back against Duncan’s shoulder, his eyes and teeth clenched. Before long he’s coming, painting the sink and mirror with long strings of his come, muscles squeezing Duncan’s fingers.

Duncan holds him, hand on his hip, face pressed to his hair, breathing him in. 

They slump against each other, like the only survivors on a life raft. 

For a long time afterward, Duncan can’t make himself pull away. 

* * *

Duncan still doesn’t know what he’s doing. He makes vague plans to leave, and tells Jazmin every third day that they’ll be out of her hair in no time, but the days pass, and his wounds heal, and soon the sutures are due to come off. 

And still: nothing. There is no concrete plan in sight at all. This is normally not how he lives his life which outside his work is careful and ordered. The future, he’s beginning to realise, is malleable, but he’s an old bastard set in his ways and so the thought eats at him until he’s jittery with restlessness. 

He needs to do something; he needs to move, or else he’ll calcify here and then he won’t recognise himself, and one day there won’t be anything left of him.

He can leave Aiden here, where it’s safe, where he won’t be found, and Duncan can resume his life of death and occasional debauchery and that will be that, happily ever after, the end. Or he can take Aiden someplace else—somewhere near the sea where the sky is the bluest it will ever be and the water is warm when it laps at your feet. Not Florida, shit hole that it is, or California where it’s always swarming with tourists, but somewhere the weather will be always balmy, the kind that urges you to melt, just a little, and at the edges.

Restlessness, boredom, the lack of good reading material because he and Jazmin have very disparate tastes—these things send him running out the front door one morning and driving the back roads for over an hour. He has half the mind to just disappear without a word but he’s left most of his belongings in Jazmin’s spare bedroom: his gun, his favourite knife, his money in a duffel bag, his lucky socks, and he wonders if he can count Aiden among them too but Aiden doesn’t belong to anyone, only himself. 

When he comes back, more exhausted than he’d left, it’s still too early for anyone to be acceptably awake and so he takes an incredibly chilly walk through the fields behind the house, moving through soft slush and ankle-high grass, smoking two cigarettes in rapid succession to keep himself warm. 

Aiden’s on the porch, hunched on the steps with a mug of coffee cupped in his hands when Duncan approaches. He watches Duncan’s stilted progression towards him, his steps slowed by the mud caking his shoes. Aiden doesn’t smile; he just sips his coffee and then leans back on his elbows, waiting until Duncan is close enough to ask a question. 

“Where were you this morning?”

Duncan contemplates how to answer this. He leans against the railing, on his elbows too, facing forward, away from the house, away from Aiden and watches the long grass in the fields bend in the wind. “I was taking a walk.” 

Aiden makes a thoughtful noise, sips again at his coffee. It’s strong; Duncan can smell it from where he’s standing. 

“Jazmin’s making pancakes,” Aiden says, after a beat.

“You’re not helping out?”

“The pancakes are for her. She says if we want some, we should make our own.” The side of his lips tilt in a rueful smile, the first hint of sun at dawn, that all is well. 

“I don’t like pancakes anyway,” Duncan says. 

Aiden hums. He’s wearing a jacket over his clothes to stave off the chill—borrowed from Jazmin’s because they’re almost the same size but different shapes: puffy sleeves and a fleece lining, the arms pinching where his muscles are softly outlined. Everything he owns he’d left in his apartment in Bucharest. He probably misses his drawings; there were so many of them in his desk drawer and pinned to the wall like butterflies. 

When they’d taken him, along with Duncan, Duncan couldn’t think past his own fury to account for any plans for the future. All he’d wanted was for Silva to cut the shit out and let Aiden go because he was in no way responsible for anything: Duncan being careless maybe, but that’s on Duncan who let himself be distracted, who had Aiden constantly on the mind. He’d done a shoddy job in Malaysia, true, but he got the job done nonetheless and there were no fingers pointing at Silva and isn’t that what matters in the end? 

Apparently not. 

Apparently Silva is a vengeful god who would stop at nothing to see Duncan suffer. Separating them had been his first mistake, taking Aiden to his own house to hide away while he taunted Duncan and demanded he do him another favour for free, only fair seeing as he fucked things up royally in Malaysia and now Silva can never sleep in the same bed as his wife. 

His second mistake had been this: underestimating Duncan’s ability to withstand pain. Pain Duncan can take in large doses; pain Duncan understands. Nature of the beast, and the business, but not knowing whether Aiden was dead or alive had been the catalyst to everything. He razed the ground and asked—for the sixth time, as nicely as possible while dripping in blood that wasn’t his—where they took the boy. They pointed him to Silva’s house. Third mistake. 

“I’m bored,” Aiden says after another pause. 

And doesn’t Duncan know it. They’ve been cooped up here for god knows how long; the days blurring together like earth and sky on a wintry night; no telling where one begins and ends, everything a grey limitless stretch as far as the eye can see. He can see how it unsettles Aiden, in his shifts in mood and his long silences. They’ll need to do something about that or soon they’ll both be going crazy. 

In the afternoon, Duncan finds himself once again in Jazmin’s workshop, rifling through her shelf and going through her drawers—an invasion of privacy, but sometimes he forgets that there is such a thing as social graces and there’s a better way of going about getting what he wants. 

Not everyone is a mark; there are spaces not always made available to him and he should learn to do the courteous thing and respect people’s boundaries. This is why he doesn’t have any friends. He only has those he considers his allies and they have equally appalling manners as civilians. 

Then there’s Jazmin, who isn’t exactly a friend but more of a person he promised to keep an eye on. And then Aiden. Always Aiden, who defies categorisation. 

“You touching my things now?” 

It’s Jazmin, at the door. 

Duncan makes a noncommittal sound in reply before flicking a look at her over his shoulder. 

“I was gonna ask if you had—something,” He makes a gesture with his hands, continues taking books out of their hiding places and putting them back. “Pen and maybe a piece of paper. Something to draw on.”

“You indulging in an actual hobby?” Jazmin feigns shock. “Duncan!”

“It’s not for me,” he says through gritted teeth. 

“Of course it’s not.” Jazmin laughs and takes the book from his vice-like grip — a battered copy of _The Flame and The Flower—_ and slips it under one arm. “The Black Kaiser doesn’t have hobbies.”

Duncan takes offence in that but he wants to make nice so he wisely keeps his comments to himself. 

After some puttering around, Jazmin manages to produce two pencils, an old journal with some pages missing, and a thimble. Duncan takes the first two and discards the thimble. Much later in the afternoon, hungover after a long nap and after one of the least satisfying smokes in his life, he goes in search for Aiden. 

He’s not in the other guest bedroom, the sheets rumpled the way he’d left it this morning, the door slightly ajar. Not in the kitchen either or the living room, which is silent and empty of activity. When Duncan hears voices coming from the front porch, he falters for a moment before pushing the door open.

Jazmin and Aiden are sitting on the swing together, talking and laughing like old friends. Aiden has his foot up on the swing, his knee pressed to his chest. He’s wearing the same jacket from this morning and he looks _warm_ in more than one way. They both do. As soon as Duncan makes it a point to shut the door behind him audibly, they stop mid-conversation and simultaneously swing their heads in his direction in an almost eerie display of mirroring. 

“How was your nap?” Jazmin asks, raising an eyebrow and smirking. 

“I felt like Old Rip Van Winkle,” Duncan says. 

“That’s because you’re the same age,” Aiden tells him gleefully, and he’s teasing, Duncan can see it in his eyes but he knows when Aiden is being mean too. He lets it pass, which he also knows will annoy Aiden to no end. Jazmin says nothing, though it’s obvious she’s waiting for the shoe to drop. 

“Well, it’s cold as balls out here so I’m going inside to make some tea,” she announces, patting Aiden on the knee and boosting herself up on her feet. “You want some?” she asks Aiden. 

Aiden shakes his head. Duncan notices she doesn’t ask him, and instead gives him a meaningful look as she passes him at the door. He doesn’t have to wait very long before Aiden scoots over to the very opposite side of the swing and jerks his head at the empty space next to him, an invitation for Duncan to join him.

“Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

Duncan goes to sit. Far be it from him to make Aiden nervous, after all. The swing creaks, wobbling for a moment as it takes his weight. He sets the journal down between them, the two pencils bookmarking the pages. Aiden eyes the journal before picking it up curiously and paging through it, the pads of his fingers rustling the unmarked pages. 

“Thought you might like to draw again,” Duncan says by way of explanation.

“I do,” Aiden says, voice hushed in reverence as he squeezes both pencils in his hands, tests their weight before putting them down. “You got me a sketchbook before. Remember the one? It had this really nice cover. Real leather. I got it checked, asked around. Not that it was important if it was authentic or not, but. At the time I had to know.” He chews his lip in thought, holds Duncan’s gaze for a moment. “I guess I’ll never get it back now.”

“Did you ever use it?” The question is out before Duncan can stop himself. 

Aiden ducks his head, blushing, scratching behind his ear self-consciously. When he’s embarrassed, he does that from time to time. It’s curious how the most unexpected things make Aiden shy: not accosting Duncan in the middle of the night demanding to suck his cock, not getting finger fucked within an inch of his life, not even calling Duncan _daddy_ like he’s been doing it for a long time, waiting for someone bigger than him and stronger to bear the weight of the world. But small acts of kindness. 

“Of course I used it. It was a gift.” _From_ _you_ , Aiden doesn’t say, but he doesn’t need to say it. Duncan knows he’s grateful, even appreciative, and Aiden still hasn’t stopped blushing anyway, squirming in his seat. “Saved it for…the more inspired stuff. Didn’t want to doodle on paper that was expensive as fuck. Waste of a good resource.”

“I can always just get you another one,” Duncan says. 

“It won’t be the same,” Aiden says, and there’s a sudden bite to it, sharp as the air around them, but also a tiny glimpse of resignation. His shoulders sink visibly. “All my best stuff was in there. The paper was great with charcoal.”

Duncan remembers buying it, and the mark’s mistress, _Rothko’s_ mistress, who had reminded him of Aiden. How her eyes widened in horror and then recognition when he came striding in through the dark with his rifle brandished. He didn’t want to kill her, he'd been tempted to let her live, but the instructions were clear and her name was on the list and the client wanted a clean slate, no loose ends whatsoever. In the end, he shot her between the eyes—quick, without looking away. He didn’t want to seem like a coward. The Black Kaiser didn’t have a heart. 

The new journal pales in comparison—the cover a black matte and worn dearly with age, with a rubbery elastic closure. Jazmin said she’d used it to store recipes, but Duncan knows it’s a lie. He can still see the faint indentations of numbers on some of the pages: maybe a list of contacts or the combinations to a safe; he doesn’t ask, because it’s none of his business. They’re all entitled to their secrets. 

But the journal proves to be a hit because he doesn’t see Aiden for the rest of the day, though this doesn’t mean Duncan sees much of him anyway on a given day: he’s off doing something or other, terrorising the poor animals in the pen behind the house by exposing them to his very involved moping, or valiantly trying to help Jazmin chop wood for the fireplace.

Later in the day, when Duncan emerges from his room for a smoke, he finds Aiden sprawled gracelessly on the couch, one foot braced on the floor while the other hangs precariously over the armrest, with his slipper off and upturned on the carpet. 

His left arm is angled outward over his head so that the pale skin of his forearm is showing. It’s as if someone had just dumped him there after a night of heavy drinking. His breathing is relaxed and untroubled. His newly appropriated drawing journal is sitting facedown on his chest, while the fingers of one hand curl loosely around a pencil. 

Duncan stands by the couch, watching him sleep. He takes the pencil and places it on the coffee table, careful not to make a sound. He takes the journal next, and sees the page Aiden had been working on only moments before. 

It’s a drawing of him, wearing his gloves, though oddly enough Duncan hasn’t worn them in a while. He also seems to be staring into the distance, at some fixed point beyond the page’s reach. He snaps the journal shut before his heart starts to race then lets his hand hover over Aiden’s cheek. 

He drops it at the last second however when he realises how intimate it would have been to touch the boy while he slept. He should leave, he knows, before he does something embarrassing. He really should. He doesn’t. Not yet. 

“Aiden,” Duncan tries but Aiden doesn’t wake up. 

Finally, Duncan shifts so that he’s kneeling on his good leg. He wraps his hand over Aiden’s heel as tenderly as he can manage. It’s pale and soft, and he guides the slipper back on his foot before getting up to have a smoke, the front door creaking quietly behind him.

* * *

Duncan wakes up to see Aiden sitting at the foot of his bed. He blinks, squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again, but Aiden’s still sitting there, watching him, a magazine open in his lap. 

The lamp next to the bed has been turned on; it’s one of those ornate ones that lights the room about as well as you’d expect which means his eyes don’t need long to adjust and there are more shadows in the room than anyone with nightmares should be comfortable with. 

“Sorry,” Aiden says in the most un-sorry voice Duncan’s ever heard in his life. Even lowlives have more remorse than that. “Did I wake you?” 

Duncan rubs a hand over his face. He’d taken half a sleeping pill before bed, a necessary evil even though he hates being drugged to death for anything. But it helps with the dreams, being so deep in REM that waking up feels like he’s being born again, newly emerged from the darkness, his mind wiped clean. He still feels like shit though afterwards: like someone had dragged him through gravel after dipping him in a vat of honey. 

“What is it?” he asks Aiden. 

Aiden looks at him hopefully. “Can I sleep here?”

Duncan can’t believe Aiden is asking him this, especially after Duncan had almost killed him after waking up from a nightmare. He hadn’t apologised for that, not in so many words. He thinks maybe he should, but he’s always been someone who let actions do more of the talking. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Aiden.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

But it’s like speaking to a small child or someone just incredibly stubborn: Aiden continues to give him that dispassionate look until finally Duncan lifts his arm and holds up a corner of the covers, wondering if this is recompense for all his bad deeds. A stupid boy with the curliest hair shouldn’t hold so much power over him, and yet he does and doesn’t even realise it.

After a second, Aiden clambers over his legs and under the sheet, shifting until he’s curled up with his back to Duncan. 

“What’s wrong now?” 

Aiden’s shoulder lifts elegantly in a shrug. 

Duncan remembers being an awkward kid, who got into accidents and kept tripping over himself until finally he outgrew all of it before his uncle could beat it out of him. He wonders if Aiden ever has a memory like that: there are moments where he seems to just move so seamlessly. 

Then Aiden shoves back the blanket, almost smacking Duncan in the face with the suddenness of the movement. “Sorry, I’ll just—”

Duncan, without thinking, swings an arm around his waist and yanks him back. Aiden flails and pain sparks through Duncan’s forehead where Aiden jabs him with an elbow, but he doesn’t let go, even when Aiden starts struggling. 

Duncan presses Aiden against him until Aiden goes boneless in his arms, his breathing evening out to a less panicked rhythm. He smells newly showered, and Duncan becomes acutely aware of the shape of his ribs beneath his palms. Duncan knows where to lay his hands on a person’s body to do the most harm, but he doesn’t know how to soothe, outside of pleasure. He’s never needed to, in a long time. He eases his grip. 

They stay like that for a while longer, Duncan holding Aiden, breathing along with him for three, four breaths, until Aiden’s head droops forward forlornly.

“What's wrong?”

Aiden sighs. Duncan feels him squirming. “You’re not planning on leaving me here are you?” he asks, his voice tinged soft with embarrassment. “Out of some misplaced sense of… _fuck_ , I don’t know, chivalry.”

“No,” Duncan lies smoothly. But either he’s lost his touch or Aiden just sees right through him, because a split second later the boy smacks him on the same arm Duncan has wrapped around him. 

“Don’t lie to me. I heard you talking to Jazmin.”

“Then why ask?”

“I wanted to see if you would tell the truth,” Aiden says. “And you didn’t. I wish I was surprised.”

Duncan has his reasons. There are enough of them to make a whole list, front to back. Leaving Aiden here will be both an act of bravery and cowardice. There are some things you can learn to walk away from and there are some things you don’t. Duncan’s lived his whole life doing the former, so it should be easy, no problem, all it takes is one step. 

“You probably can’t go back home,” he says, thinking of Aiden’s apartment, and the life he’d left behind. “Not for a while. It still isn’t safe.”

“I kind of figured.” Aiden huffs a bitter laugh then he’s pushing himself out of Duncan’s grip and standing by the side of the bed, undoing the knot of his pajama pants with sharp, determined tugs.

Duncan sits up. “What are you doing, Aiden?” He narrows his eyes. 

“What does it look like?” Aiden asks. “I want to have sex.” 

“With me.” It’s not a question, though it should be. 

“Yes, with you,” Aiden says, exasperated, hands on his hips like some displeased matron, except matrons don’t just suddenly show up in the middle of the night telling you they want a fuck and then start undressing without so much as a _by your leave._ “Unless there’s someone else in here you’re not telling me about?” 

“There’s no one.”

“Well, then, good! That settles it then doesn’t it.”

It doesn’t, not really, but like that night in the bathroom, all Duncan can do is let Aiden take the reins if he wants to come out of this unscathed. Aiden shimmies out of his pajama pants and steps out of them. He leaves them on a pile on the floor and then meets Duncan’s unblinking gaze with the same unflinching intensity, daring him to ask questions as if Duncan isn’t the most dangerous thing currently in the room. He’s not wearing any underwear. Duncan wishes he were surprised. Aiden’s legs are pale, even in the dark, but his thighs are faintly shadowed by a nest of dark curls. Duncan can make out his cock—jutting up without any shame, canted to the right. 

Duncan is already half-hard himself from just a glimpse of the boy’s knees, an effect that can either be attributed to questionable taste or maybe Aiden in general. 

“I’m nervous and freaking out and I just want to stop feeling nervous and stop freaking out,” Aiden explains, as he climbs back up the bed, in just his t-shirt and a pair of wooly socks. He bites his lip and glances up at Duncan through his curls. His shirt can’t hide how stiff his nipples are, peaking the fabric. The shirt’s gone through so many washes because both of them barely have any change of clothes, and Duncan can see everything outlined in lamplight. 

“And you think I can fuck it out of you?” He lets out a bemused huff as Aiden settles in his lap.

“I don’t know,” Aiden says, swallowing. “Can you?”

Duncan can certainly try. He doubts he can aggravate his wounds anymore than he already has; he’s already started to pick at his stitches which Jazmin had warned him were going to itch like a bitch as soon as his skin started closing up. 

“There’s lube in the drawer,” Duncan says, and Aiden grins but doesn’t ask. Aiden twists himself just out of reach so he can fumble with the contents of the drawer while straddling Duncan’s lap. Duncan anchors him in place, one hand on the slim taper of his waist, thumb curled over the dip in his hip. His skin is warm. Duncan squeezes his waist.

Aiden lets out a triumphant noise as he finds the lube and flips the cap open with a thumbnail.

“KY Love Passion?”

“It’s not mine,” Duncan snorts. He’d found it in one of the rooms while on the hunt for spare batteries after the portable radio stopped working. It seems Jazmin isn’t as alone as she purports to be and accounts for occasional company—but there are a host of other things in the house too that point to a whole life lived outside the bounds of their chosen profession. Maybe Duncan should start taking notes.

“Hope you don’t mind me keeping my shirt on. The room’s kind of drafty.” Aiden glances up at the ceiling vengefully, before seeming to remember what he had initially set out to do and squeezing lube onto his fingers. 

“And what about this?” Duncan asks, stroking two fingers over Aiden’s left nipple, through the thin fabric. 

“Uhhh,” Aiden says, breathy, as he bites his lip again. Duncan presses harder with his thumb and Aiden moans.

“I’ll just take a couple of minutes to—you know. Prep myself.” He flushes, and Duncan can feel an answering prickle on the back of his neck as he shivers in anticipation, his dick pulsing. 

“You can watch,” Aiden says, as if Duncan would ever let the opportunity slip past him.

“I will.”

Aiden nods, before scooting back. He’s still straddling Duncan, angling himself on his tailbone to brace his feet on either side of him, before spreading his knees wide. He leans his weight on one palm, and then it’s right there: Duncan can see everything. His pink cock, his heavy balls, the deceptively tiny pucker of his hole that could fit anything like a wizard’s sleeve. The boy takes cock so beautifully, his body moulds to fit the shape of it. 

Aiden’s eyes flutter shut as he starts stretching himself: one finger first, and then two, sliding inside with some resistance because he hasn’t been fucked, not in a way he craves it, for a while. Then he coats his fingers with more lube and tries again and the glide is easier this time as he sinks down to the second knuckle with an audible hitch in his breath, panting with his tongue out, his head tipped back in pleasure. 

Duncan can watch him all day, fingering himself to an orgasm, but he’s also just a man, and wants to fuck the boy stupid. So he grips Aiden’s wrist firmly and pulls his fingers out one by one, watching his hole clench pathetically around nothing, slick with trails of lube. 

“Get up here,” he barks, patting his thigh as Aiden blinks up at him seemingly in a daze and out of breath. “Come on. Ride daddy’s cock.”

Aiden opens his mouth. Duncan can hear the protest forming, imagine the prickly shape of Aiden’s indignation because he probably wasn’t expecting _that_ and to be frankly neither was Duncan, but it’s like a sudden change comes over the boy and Aiden whimpers and nods, cheeks pinking. “Yes, daddy. I’ll ride your cock.”

Duncan enjoys his obedience more than he cares to admit.

Their hands tangle on the waistband of his long johns as they yank it down to bare his cock. Then Aiden is gripping Duncan’s dick, slicking it up with lube so deftly Duncan groans loud enough to wake Jazmin across the hall. 

“Easy now,” he grunts, jaw tensing as Aiden squeezes him, stroking the head coyly like this is his first time seeing Duncan’s dick in the flesh and he didn’t just beg to have it shoved halfway down his throat a few nights ago. “Be a good boy and don’t play around.”

When Aiden guides Duncan’s dick into his hole, Duncan surprises himself by not coming then and there: the boy is so fucking tight. Tight and trembling but so eager to have Duncan inside him that he whines after the first inch breaches him. Then it’s smooth sailing from thereon out as he lowers himself down by another inch and then another until he’s filled to the hilt with Duncan’s cock and whining from the pure pleasure of it. 

Duncan can’t stop himself from trailing his fingers up the indentation of Aiden’s spine, hiking his shirt up, feeling the curve of the muscle bunching as Aiden moves his hips. Aiden has one hand curled around his shoulder; the other he uses to grip the headboard for traction. Aiden grinds down, bearing his full weight on Duncan’s lap and Duncan rolls his hips in immediate answer, thrusting up to give him what he really needs. And he knows: this is what the boy needs, when he’s overwhelmed, when he’s feeling unmoored. 

The bed creaks and sways like a boat at sea, rattling the wall on every third thrust; otherwise they’re silent, staring at each other until Aiden becomes the first to break. He starts to whimper, loudly, like Duncan is hurting him, before throwing his arms around Duncan’s shoulders as Duncan fucks up into him. They meet each other halfway, their rhythm never faltering, like a familiar and practiced dance. 

Duncan’s shirt is damp where Aiden is rutting against him and dribbling a mess of precome. Duncan slows him down with a hand on each hip.

“Shh,” he says, sliding his hand up and down Aiden’s flanks, then up again. “There’s no hurry.”

“It’s _good_ ,” Aiden laughs, chest jittery with his breath. “You always make it feel so good.” He doesn’t tack on a _daddy_ to that and for once Duncan is relieved. It would have ruined the moment. The whole daddy thing is just something that they like to do: it doesn’t need to pervade their whole lives, the same way Duncan doesn’t have to sleep with a gun tucked under his pillow at all times.

“You think you can come like this? From riding my cock?”

“Uh-huh.” Aiden takes Duncan’s hand and places it palm-down on his chest. Duncan takes the hint and starts rubbing his nipple, over his shirt first with one hand and then under it with both, squeezing and tugging until Aiden gasps, so sensitive and responsive it’s a marvel he hasn’t come apart. 

“I want to,” Aiden hums. “Maybe I can. Maybe if you try very hard to make me.”

“I can fuck you on your back,” Duncan offers, hitching his hips so Aiden can feel him even deeper, rubbing up where the boy needs it, so he’s stretched to his limit and breathing harder for it. Duncan may be an old man, but he has few tricks up his sleeve, and sex is just another one of the several languages he worked hard to learn from instinct and experience.

“Don’t want you pulling your stitches, old man.”

Duncan slides his gaze down Aiden’s arm where the bullet grazed him, the skin already healing. It needed only a few stitches and Duncan had watched with his breath bated as Jazmin undid the sutures weeks later, Aiden with his face scrunched up because the sight made him queasy though he never once looked away. It reminds Duncan that Aiden can be hurt, that he’d _been_ hurt, and because of him. That he might want to be a little kinder.

“I should take you over my knee for that,” Duncan says, raising an eyebrow. 

“And spank me?”

Aiden sounds far too thrilled about the prospect so Duncan just grunts. 

“I’d like that,” Aiden whispers, sounding sheepish. “I think I can take it. I can take whatever you give me. As long as it’s you who’s giving it.”

“And if I say I want to tie you up and fuck you several times in the course of one day?”

Aiden whimpers and Duncan decides he won’t mind getting used to the sound. 

Then Aiden shivers, his gaze going dark. He licks his lips until his mouth is wet and glistening and Duncan can feel him clenching around his cock. “I’ll let you, _daddy_.” 

“You’ll let me use you, whichever way I want?”

“Yes,” No hesitation, not even a pause. 

Duncan squeezes his ass. 

“Your mouth,” Duncan says, “Your hole.”

“Sure,” Aiden grins, like he’s drunk, like he doesn’t care. “I’ll let you do anything. Fuck me any way you want.”

Duncan kisses him. A proper kiss, not like the one on the porch, when Aiden had taken him by surprise and had just gone for it, but a truer one, slow and careful. Then Aiden surges against him and he’s panting against Duncan’s mouth, and they’re kissing like teenagers, sloppy, eager, the kiss full of spit and vigour but Duncan doesn’t care, who gives a fuck, he certainly doesn’t; they have all night, they can do this until morning, because it’s hard to want anything else when he’s got Aiden in his lap, sitting on his cock, shaking like the slightest wind will tear him apart and kissing him like it’s prayer and worship in one. 

He does fuck Aiden on his back, eventually, in long leisurely strokes, keeping both his injuries and Aiden’s comfort in mind, keeping his mouth to Aiden’s collarbone where the taste of salt is the strongest, where he can feel him vibrating with laughter, tickled by the grain of stubble on Duncan’s jaw. One day, Duncan thinks, with a sudden and fierce longing for a future that seems attainable, here and now, one day he’ll turn Aiden’s skin pink with it, rub his face all over him, starting with his thighs, until he laughs and laughs. 

Duncan comes first with a groan because he doesn’t have the stamina he once did because otherwise he would have gone on and on if he could. He jerks Aiden’s pretty cock in his hand until Aiden convulses, writhing, wringing that last bit of come from Duncan’s spent dick with his ass. 

Duncan sinks on top of him, in the aftermath, face tucked against Aiden’s damp neck before rolling away and staring at the ceiling, catching his breath. No cracks up there or mould, just a lighting fixture swinging from a heavy brass chain.

Aiden yawns, breaking the spell, shifting so he can pull the blankets up his legs. He’s right: the heating isn’t too good in this room, especially when you’ve got your dick out. Duncan tucks himself back into his long johns before following Aiden’s lead and sliding under the blankets, where it’s warmer and the sides of their legs can brush either by accident or on purpose. 

“Why were you nervous,” Duncan finds himself asking, remembering their earlier conversation. “And _freaking out_?”

Aiden gives the question some thought but he doesn’t answer. Duncan thinks he’s fallen asleep, because sometimes sex can be just that good; he can feel exhaustion tugging at him as well, the late hour and exertion and drugs compounding on each other, but he sits up to satisfy one other craving first and grabs his cigarettes from the nightstand. A rustle next to him makes him pause. He lights his cigarette anyway; it pulses in the dark, a bright orange that fades away into threads of smoke. 

“Promise me something,” Aiden says, hands tucked under his cheek, staring at him without blinking. “Promise me you wouldn’t dump me here like unwanted garbage.”

Duncan frowns. He takes a drag of his cigarette before answering. “You’re neither, Aiden.”

“Promise me,” Aiden says.

It’s the look in Aiden’s face that makes Duncan hold his tongue. Aiden waits, and Duncan can keep him waiting for as long as he wants, he realises, but even he isn’t that cruel. “Promise,” he says. He’s surprised to find that he means it. 

Duncan smokes his cigarette in silence. He watches Aiden put on his pajama pants, leave the room and then come back with cool hands and the sides of his face damp with water. Then he wriggles back under the covers, resuming his earlier position, inching closer and closer to Duncan’s thigh that Duncan just decides to give up all pretence and pull him into his lap. He strokes a thumb down Aiden’s cheek, buries his fingers in his thick hair. Aiden sighs, and it’s almost funny, how it’s the best sound in all of the world, how it fills Duncan with relief knowing Aiden is safe, here with him.

“I’m not some helpless thing that constantly needs protection,” Aiden tells him, just minutes before he falls asleep, his petulance warped by a series of yawns. 

“You’re mine,” Duncan says, because in the dark there can be secrets. “I’ll always want to protect you. It doesn’t mean you’re weak.”

* * *

When the stitches finally come off, Duncan asks Jazmin if she would like spar. She keeps a makeshift ring in her basement, the floors covered in rubber mats while a canvas punching bag hangs precariously from the ceiling, gathering dust. 

The basement also happens to be filled with enough artillery to blow up a small town, because she says she likes to be ready just in case. People in their line of work have to constantly look over their shoulder because even after you’ve hung up the proverbial towel, someone somewhere will still want you dead. No one cares if you’re retired, or quit or have settled somewhere to start a family. This kind of life follows you wherever you go. 

Duncan’s surprised Jazmin has survived this long, unbothered. She flicks her gaze down, crossing her arms. 

“You sure that’s a good idea Duncan?” 

“I can take you,” he says.

“Oh, I don’t doubt that.” 

Despite her protests, she’s already toeing off her shoes, leaving them by the door so they can stand facing each other on the mats. “I just don’t want you bleeding again all over my floor again. You have any idea how hard that shit is to clean?”

“No ma’am.” He smiles, and she smiles back. They wrap their hands in boxing tape, then proceed to take their positions. “No contact,” she says, lifting a finger, counting. “I don’t want to be patching you up again. All right?”

“All right,” Duncan agrees.

“Also, no grabbing my hair. I know you fight dirty.” She flips her braids to the side, the beads in them clinking, and Duncan smiles again in spite of himself because the gesture makes her seem young, more than the oversized clothing and fuzzy bedroom slippers she likes to wear indoors.

“Anything else?”

“I’m gonna have so much fun whipping your ass, old man.”

And off they go. 

Duncan hasn’t done this in years but his body remembers. He evades the fist she swings his way, ducking under jabs, fists curled near his head, as they circle each other in a slow stalk.

They’re a good match. Duncan is considerably bulkier but Jazmin is faster and time passes quickly from then on as they try to land blows while keeping the physical contact to a minimum. It’s a lot harder than it seems, tempering their strength when they’re capable of so much more, and Duncan finds himself sweating, breathing heavily before long, his muscles aching and his body coming alive with the old hum of adrenaline. 

Then he realises they have an audience, and Jazmin takes the momentary distraction for what it is: an opening. She lunges forward, only to stop mere inches from his face to flick him on the forehead and laugh. 

Duncan blinks. 

“I’m gonna go take a shower,” she announces, waving at him and patting Aiden on the arm on her way upstairs, shoes slung over her shoulder by the shoestring. 

Duncan wipes his face on the hem of his shirt. It’s soaked through and uncomfortable, matting to his skin, so he takes it off and throws it over his shoulder after using it to sop off the sweat. “How long have you been sitting there?” he asks Aiden, still breathing hard, because that’s the most exercise he’s had in a while. It doesn’t help that he has a smoking habit. That, in the end, will kill him, more than threats of revenge or violence, but he’s made it to forty-eight without incident so there’s no point quitting now. 

Aiden has his journal open in his lap, a pencil holding the pages open. Duncan can’t see what’s on the pages and when he pads towards the bench where Aiden is so casually sitting with his legs spread, Aiden closes the journal with a resounding snap.

“Nice form.”

“Thank you,” Duncan says. He smiles, settling down next to him, elbows on his knees. He can feel sweat beading his spine and sliding down; it’s warmer down here than the rest of the house, because it’s where Jazmin keeps the furnace.

“I can teach you, if you want,” he offers. 

Aiden raises both his eyebrows. “Sure,” he says, with a bounce to his step that’s almost worrying because then Duncan gets the feeling that he’s only been waiting for Duncan to ask. Then Aiden starts shucking off his shirt in addition to kicking off his shoes, and it’s all downhill from there. 

“You don’t have to—” Duncan starts but Aiden’s already moved on to his socks and there’s something endearing about seeing him so determined. That’s a lie: Duncan, just like any other man, enjoys having something pretty to look at. He can see the lean cut of Aiden’s torso, the sparse line of hair trailing down his belly button. He must know the effect this has on Duncan because he smiles widely and bats his eyes.

“Now we’re even.”

“In terms of what?”

Aiden shrugs. 

Duncan is a couple of weight classes above him, but Aiden makes up for it by not adhering as strictly to traditional sparring rules: he kicks and kicks and his punches are rabbit-quick, and he has a mean left hook that Duncan is finding harder and harder to avoid. He has all this restless energy, just simmering under the surface of his skin, but his form is sloppy, and each time Duncan finds an opening to exploit.

“To be fair,” Duncan says, as Aiden wipes sweat dripping off his hairline with a fist. “Artists are lovers, not fighters.”

Aiden shakes his head, but it’s clear he’s fighting off a laugh. “Oh, fuck off, you’re so full of shit.” He charges forward but Duncan neatly steps out of the way, cupping the back of his neck to guide him back to the ring.

Duncan corrects his stance, touches his hand to the small of his back, lines their bodies so he can show Aiden how to hold his fists. One of these days, maybe he’ll teach him how to fire a gun too. 

“Your shoulders are tense. Just relax. Breathe deep. And in.” He lets his lips brush the shell of Aiden’s ear, peaking behind a riot of curls. 

“You’re cheating,” Aiden says, before pushing his ass against Duncan’s crotch and spinning around to face him. Duncan isn’t expecting that, and so it catches him off guard when Aiden steps on his foot and then brings him down with a sharp cry—or attempts to anyway, Duncan lets him have at it, but takes Aiden with him on the tumble down, bearing the brunt of their combined weight as he falls flat on his back on the mat. 

His breath feels like it’s been punched out of him; his vision swims a little. But he doesn’t take his hands off Aiden’s waist, the only thing anchoring him to the present. They’re panting both, pressing sweat skin to skin, but Duncan doesn’t mind. He likes the thought of his smell lingering on Aiden, and Aiden’s on him, something to carry with him for the rest of the day, like a memory.

“This is fun.” Aiden grins, rearing up to sit on Duncan’s lap as if already declaring himself the victor. His throat is glistening, and there’s that ugly animal urge to bite, to mark, and Duncan realises for the first time that he’s never allowed himself to do so: too afraid of the thought of even semi-permanence. Of never being able to stop and step back from the brink.

“Fun for you?” Duncan asks, with a raised eyebrow.

“For both of us.” Aiden rubs a finger down the centre of Duncan’s chest, staring raptly before tugging gently at the tufts of hair until Duncan grunts in response. “I thought you were gonna give me a hard time.”

Duncan appraises him, capturing Aiden’s wrist and pressing his thumb to his pulse so Aiden looks up from staring at his chest. “You’re pretty good, you know. For a novice,” he says. 

“I’m not stupid.” Aiden rolls his eyes heavenward. “I know you were faking the entire time.”

Duncan feigns offence. 

“One day,” Aiden promises, and he’s back to the tugging, but he does it much softly now, with careful hands. “I’ll get you. Just you wait.”

Duncan doesn’t doubt it. They stay that way for as long as they can. Aiden makes himself comfortable on his chest, head pillowed on his ribs, their legs tangled like branches, every part of them touching, moving in sync—and their combined breath, a steady in and out. 

* * *

“How long has it been?” Duncan asks Jazmin two days later.

Jazmin pretends to check a watch she isn’t wearing and then taps her chin. “Thirty nine days, forty tomorrow.” She pours a cup of coffee, blowing on it before passing it over to Duncan who takes a perfunctory sip before setting it down, heat searing down his throat. 

“We’ll be gone by tomorrow,” he says.

“You said that before I took your stitches out,” she reminds him with a laugh.

“Yes, but this time I mean it.”

“And when have I heard that before?” Jazmin hums, hiding her smirk behind her cup, her eyes crinkling with amusement. 

“We’ll leave,” he says more firmly. He peers out the small window in the kitchen, fringed with yellow curtains dotted with white flowers: outside the weather is grey and cold. Somewhere in the house is a warm bed where Aiden is still sleeping, mouth open to soft snores.

“You can stay if you want, I don’t mind,” Jazmin says, watching him, the same hint of longing in her voice that he recognises in himself when he thinks about all the lives he could never live. “Why the rush?”

* * *

There’s nothing much to pack. They’ve been wearing the same rotation of clothes for a month, and all Duncan _did_ bring fits into a duffel bag. It’s stuff he grabbed without thinking before he went to retrieve Aiden. It’s the same bag he always brings with him to a job: sturdy, nondescript, conceals weapons fairly well. Now it’s stocked with a few days’ worth of food, thanks to Jazmin who said she had baked too much cornbread the night before that she didn’t want to go to waste.

He tosses the bag into the backseat of the jeep the next morning, early to rise and eager to get a head start. But then Aiden doesn’t get up until an hour later and then there’s breakfast to be had and a hot shower he insists on taking before the long drive ahead. He asks Duncan where they’re going; Duncan wishes he knew. There isn’t a plan, but there’s money in several accounts, and Silva’s men along with Silva himself are dead. 

The problem is that Silva is friends with some pretty important people and Duncan is well known enough that if word gets out—and it will, he’s sure—then there’s bound to be backlash. People will talk, and people will get pissed, or afraid, and then they’ll send their men after him because Duncan broke the age old rule: never fuck with the client. Except he did better, or worse, depending on who you asked: he _shot_ the client and didn’t bother cleaning up after the job to send a message. 

“I’ll be glad to be rid of the two of you,” Jazmin says at the door, teasing again. He can’t remember if she had the same sense of humour eight years ago; then again they never really had the opportunity to sit down and talk about anything except shop. 

Duncan lights a cigarette, the last one before they hit the road. “Thought you said we could stay longer?” 

“Yeah well, you’re not as subtle as you think. I could hear you having sex.” She makes a face, and he almost wants to laugh, except a part of him is mortified. “I’ll make sure to bin the lube and switch brands. You’ve put me off KY Love Passion forever.”

“Right,” he says, stunned into silence. She smiles and holds her palm out so he can pass her the cigarette and they smoke together in companionable silence. She doesn’t see them off, disappearing into the front door as Duncan watches her house get smaller and smaller in the side mirror, like an old memory from childhood or a dream he’s trying to remember. 

Three hours later they find themselves in the little town of Sighisoara where the houses are crammed together like something out of a storybook, brightly-painted in cheery pastels and topped with sharp crooked roofs but still entirely charming, and the cobbled streets are one long maze of secret corners going on and on—a town untouched by time. 

It’s a tourist’s paradise, but because it’s the off-season, the town square is relatively peaceful: just people going about their day as normal; the occasional person on a bike, tradesmen opening shop, greeting each other across the square, and then Duncan and Aiden trying to blend in with the locals. 

They buy deep fried donuts from one of the only three bakeries in town, sprinkled with powdered sugar on top and still piping hot from the oven. Duncan takes his with coffee, strong enough to knock down two horses, along with a cigarette. Aiden takes his with a creamy latte, and together they sit with their pastries at a table on the sidewalk, watching life as it unfolds around them bit by bit.

“We should shop for clothes,” Aiden says, tugging on the ill-fitting collar of his shirt. “I’m sick of wearing pants with JUICY on the ass. I miss wearing my own clothes.”

Duncan hides a snort of laughter behind a paper napkin before nodding his assent. It’s not difficult to find shops as they’re all closer to the square, but the one that catches Aiden’s eye is a fifteen minute walk from the bakery: a shop that sells everything from used clothing to hand-painted postcards. It’s empty when they walk in, save for the proprietor behind the counter who greets them in English before unfolding a newspaper and going back to ignoring them. 

Duncan can’t tell whether the clothes are out of style, because he’s not someone who is up to date on these things, but Aiden mutters as much as he weaves between racks and picks items here and there until he has a teetering armful. Then he disappears into a dressing booth at the back, curtained off with a flimsy blue tarp. Duncan is more selective about his choices, and between the two of them comes up with three black long-sleeved shirts that all look alike, a leather belt, and pair of dark grey cargo pants. 

Aiden steps out of the dressing booth in better-fitting jeans and a red jacket, not fit for the cold weather but not lacking in warmth either. He looks… Duncan smooths a hand over the lapels, running his fingers down the soft material of the sleeves. He isn’t expecting to feel suddenly tongue-tied or overcome with the urge to touch a part of Aiden immediately. 

“You like?” Aiden asks, tilting his head to the side before glancing quickly at the counter where the proprietor doesn’t even look at them, completely engrossed in his reading.

“You look comfortable,” is all Duncan says. 

“I think I look cute,” Aiden says decisively.

“Sure,” Duncan agrees.

“Then say I look cute.”

Duncan stares at him, but Aiden must have all the time in the world because he gives him a patient smile. Aiden pokes at his shoulder, again and again until Duncan takes both of his wrists in his hands and squeezes, a gentle pressure. 

“Come on,” Aiden says in sing-song, “Say it. Say I look cute.”

“You look cute.”

Aiden laughs, a clear and honest sound. “Thanks. You’re paying for the stuff so I just wanted you to like the clothes I picked.”

Duncan has a feeling telling Aiden he has no preference won’t sit well with him so instead he says, “I like whatever you wear.”

“Even when it’s sweatpants that say JUICY on the ass?”

“Even then.”

They pay for their purchases and walk side by side down the empty streets, dodging low-hanging shop signs and swerving cyclists, shopping bags in hand. Aiden asks to stop at a bookstore after thumbing through a bin of used books outside. A card at the window says ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING in English and then again underneath that in smaller font in French so Duncan lingers on a street corner to smoke his cigarette. 

This is his first time in Sighisoara. He’s seen pictures of it on tourist brochures but it’s quite a different thing to behold when the inns are not crowded shoulder to shoulder with people from out of town and the markets aren’t loud with the shouts of vendors trying to sell you something or another. 

Aiden can live here, he thinks, and he’ll thrive, because this is an artist’s every dream, a wealth of inspiration all around from river to sky to the towering spires of castles striding the hills, architecture built in the baroque style, every doorway and pilaster and roof rife with ancient history. In the summer when the weather has thawed, there will be festivals and even more tourists, and maybe on one of these summers, Aiden will meet a girl his own age and fall in love and forget about him. 

Duncan can leave him here, and disappear, and subject him to the kind of life he deserves, the kind empty of him, except that he’ll never forgive himself if he did and he’s a selfish bastard through and through. There are so few things in his life that he allows himself to have, and even fewer that he lets himself keep. He _wants_ , for the first time in a long time, and the want overshadows everything— the uncertainty of the future and the pain of the past, the ghost of every bad deed he’s done.

Duncan considers this, and then he starts walking away from the bookstore, pace picking up speed when he turns the corner. There’s a tug on his arm and he wheels around to find Aiden standing there with his face wind-chapped and flushed and his hair slightly flat on one side. 

Duncan smooths his expression into a blank calm, before reaching out to cup Aiden’s face, rearranging his curls until the boy leans into his touch and sighs. His heart is pounding noticeably, every muscle in his body tense.

“You know, I was ready to kick your ass when I saw you weren’t outside. You were planning to ditch me, weren’t you?”

“No,” Duncan says. But at Aiden’s unimpressed look, he amends: “I thought about it. But I would have left you with the jeep. There’s money in the bag. Eight thousand euros.”

“I know there’s money in the bag.” Aiden shoves Duncan’s hand away from his face with a displeased huff. “You really think you can get rid of me? You think I don’t _know_ what you’re doing?”

“What am I doing?” Duncan asks, because lately and ever since meeting Aiden he wants to know himself. He’s never acted so out of character in his life. Duncan likes plans: he likes making them and he sticks to them. But Aiden has thrown a wrench in all of them and now Duncan’s here in this tourist town with no clear idea of what to do next. 

“ _Fuck you, Duncan._ You’re incredibly selfish sometimes, you know that?”

“I’ve been told,” Duncan says stiffly, tugging at his own ear. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you want from me.”

Aiden just shakes his head at him. “What I want is for you to stop treating me like I don’t know what’s good for me.”

“Aiden,” Duncan interrupts, temper rising hotly like it never has before he met the boy. “ _I’m_ not good for you.”

“Well, will you at least let me decide whether that’s true?” Aiden asks, voice rising in pitch and volume, his hands becoming involved now. “For myself?”

Duncan stumbles a bit at that and he stares at Aiden without blinking. Aiden stares back, his gaze determined, and Duncan catches himself briefly thinking about shoving Aiden against the brick wall and pinning him there so he can have him—out in the open, trousers rolled down to his ankles, a rough and dirty slide of bodies. To teach him a lesson if nothing else because he’s never met anyone so confounding or _pushy_ before. Usually people treat him with more fear and deference; Aiden just doesn’t care.

Duncan finds himself smiling in spite of himself. “All right,” he agrees after a beat. 

“All right?”

“Yes,” Duncan agrees placidly. 

Aiden looks at him for a long moment, trying to read him for signs of deception before loosening his stance and sighing. Then he nods, just the once. “Good,” he says, and they fall into step together, easy as anything.

“Did you find anything interesting at the store?” Duncan asks, in an obvious attempt to make peace.

“Just a few books for the road.” Aiden holds up a bag to show Duncan; it looks heavy, and the handle is straining. “Fantasy stuff. Lord of the Rings. Drawing books. Some John Grisham because I saw some on the shelf back at your apartment and figured you might not have read the newer stuff.” He stops and then squints at the sky, elbowing Duncan in the ribs to stop him in his tracks. 

“Hey, look,” Aiden says, smiling and Duncan does; he looks, and there’s ash raining down all over them, except that it isn’t ash, but flakes of snow—the first of the season. A few land on his eyelashes, sharp and stinging. When he glances down, there’s snow settled finely on Aiden’s shoulders like tinsel.

Aiden shivers, his breath visible puffs in the air. Duncan doesn’t put an arm around him, nothing sentimental like that, but he tugs his own gloves off and takes Aiden’s hand in his before turning it palm-up. 

Aiden looks at him bashfully. His hand is soft, his palm calloused from work. Duncan squeezes it before closing his fingers over the shell of it. 

“Didn’t you get anything warm?” He makes it a point to click his tongue, buttoning up the clasps on the inside of the wrists, the right one first then the left and then Aiden’s fingers are covered, ensconced in the warm leather.

“I got a scarf but I left it in the jeep. Clashed with the jacket.” Aiden doesn’t sound repentant at all. 

Duncan gives him a look. 

Aiden just smiles and elbows him again, before flexing his fingers in his newly-acquired gloves. Then he presses his hands over his face, rubbing his cheeks, his skin flushing the same colour as his jacket. 

“Can I keep them?” he asks.

“Of course,” Duncan says. He doesn’t even have to think twice. “They’re yours.”

Their shoulders bump with every second step. Duncan has a fleeting, absurd urge to hold Aiden’s hand, but Aiden beats him to it by mere seconds and tugs at his sleeve. Then he laces their hands together, palm to palm, as they cross the street and make their way down the cobbled sidewalk leading back to the jeep.

* * *

On the road again, with the windows up to keep the heat in, Aiden makes himself comfortable in the passenger seat with a dog-eared copy of _The Martian Chronicles_ complete with yellowed pages and scribbles in the margins left by its previous owner. Halfway into it, after voicing out complaints about the plot, he shoves the book inside the glove box. When he makes a curious noise, Duncan glances sideways to see him holding something in a cupped palm. 

It’s the phone charm—the one Duncan bought all those months ago while on a job in Malaysia. The charm is in the shape of a knife, the blade painted blue and made of plastic. The hilt is covered in glitter. Ostentatious, but funny at the time, something he thought Aiden would appreciate, like a private joke between them. 

“Oh this is cute,” Aiden grins, twirling the string around a finger. “Is this yours?”

Truthfully, Duncan has almost forgotten about it. He tells Aiden about the woman he bought it from who led him inside the small cavern of her stall and asked him questions about the person he was buying for: whether or not it was a gift, for a lover or a friend. 

Duncan hadn’t known to answer at that time but he likes to think that he does now. 

Aiden runs his thumb over the blunt groove of the blade, over and over. He has a thoughtful look on his face. There’s a bit of cream on the corner of his lips. 

“I wanted something that would remind you of me,” Duncan says. 

And Aiden, he smiles and shakes his head, looking incredibly pleased even as he blushes. It’s like the sun breaking after a storm, or a pinprick of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. 

“Then you should’ve gotten me something with a moustache,” Aiden says. “That would have been more memorable.” 

Aiden is still smiling, teeth showing and his eyes crinkling in the corners, teasing. This time Duncan doesn’t tamp down on the desire to kiss him, because there’s really no point, he’ll always feel like this no matter what when faced with this stupid boy, overwhelmed and replete, a little reckless, a little heady. 

Duncan slows down on the side of the road. He kisses Aiden deep and long, and Aiden kisses back and laughs. He laughs and laughs, and it’s a sound that fills all the empty rooms of Duncan’s heart.


End file.
